Still life with wheelbarrow

As production, such as it is with tiny tomatoes and finger-sized zucchini, in the vegetable garden winds down, I'm starting to pile compost and larger yard waste in the plot. I do this every year as part of the preparation for fall and winter. The plot becomes a staging area for getting rid of plants, sticks, and stalks from other parts of the yard.

A desiccated artichoke and a pile of rotting apples.

We had a little excitement yesterday morning when a light rain became a downpour, replete with lighting and thunder at close range. All of a sudden, we noticed that water started backing up and leaking into the utility room on the ground floor. We've had some water during heavy rain for years, but this was different. And very wet. We scrambled to move stuff to a dry part of the room. Water was backing up into a pipe that drains condensed water from our central heating boiler (I won't go into the technical details, mostly because I don't really understand them) and was flowing out onto the floor beneath the unit.

During a brief lull in the storm, I went out to where one of the downspouts from the roof gutters, the one closest to the leak, empties into a pipe that takes the water away. That's also where the boiler's drain pipe empties. The junction box was full of water and overflowing. I grabbed a small bowl and started bailing to get the water out, but it kept filling up. After a few minutes, I ran and got my handy plumber's snake (which we figured out later is called un furet in French). A little snaking quickly revealed that the drainage pipe was blocked. I pushed and pushed with the snake until, all of a sudden, the water in the drain pipe disappeared with a whoosh, as if someone had flushed a toilet.

I think we need to find the French equivalent of Roto-Rooter to clean that pipe out. It must be blocked by roots or other debris. Once I poked through with the snake, the water infiltration from the boiler pipe subsided. We swept as much of the standing water as we could out into the greenhouse. A few hours later the utility room floor was dry.

So, how was your Friday morning?