Gardening for all the senses, including thoughts and emotions, is not hard to cultivate. Sometimes you have to just wander outside to check the rain gauge.

Case in point: Regardless of what happened at the airport weather station, I know for sure that my garden got 2 and 3/10 inches of rain last weekend. And I appreciate every tenth.

Because I have populated my garden over the years with mostly tried-and-true, cemetery-tough plants that can take weeks and even months of no rainfall, my garden rarely gets hose treatment. The main exceptions are newly planted shrubs and the initial establishment of seasonal flowers, veggies, and herbs, which are mostly clustered near my two faucets. I am so lazy with watering I even cut my 25-foot hose to just long enough to reach what I need without having to roll up anything extra.

Still, I am a weather tourist who pulls up the phone’s weather app regularly mostly out of curiosity but sometimes for practical reasons, like when checking weekly and daily forecasts to help me plan my gardening or watching the weather radar to give me a heads up on how to prepare for a long hike.

But after every rain I still check my simple analog gauge. Like my garden hose, leaf rake, bird bath, digging fork, fingernail brush, and coffee cup, it’s one of those quintessential devices that keep me, the only moving part, connected both sensually and intellectually to the garden.

My rain gauge is not a fancy one like those used by my friends in CoCoRaHS, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow network, a grassroots group of volunteer backyard weather observers who upload their garden’s precipitation data into an interactive website (found at cocorahas.org). And yeah, Mississippi has quite a few members.

Not far removed from the simple bucket and ruler used by ancient Greeks, it isn’t an expensive or complicated device like the popular self-emptying “tipping bucket” types which actually don’t work so well during our heavy downpours. No batteries like the digital kinds that demand I discuss weather with my phone.

Mine is a simple tube with markings on the side, set out away from wind-shifting structures and trees so it catches what falls straight down. I got it for free during a Mississippi Public Broadcasting pledge drive, just like the ones given away at farm shows or bought off the rack at garden centers and hardware stores. I sometimes have to scrub out the film of scuzzy green algae and swish out dead beetles and expect it to crack in a winter freeze

I could get more accuracy if I used a two-foot-tall kind with a four-inch funnel at the top, but my test tube shaped thing suits my cottage-garden attitude. And it was gifted, and it works. Again, not that I need it in the first place, because I expect plants to survive whatever falls regardless of the amount.

But the simple device, like an outdoor thermometer, keeps me intellectually as well as physically involved. While simply trudging outside to check it, I see flowers and butterflies, hear the burbling water garden and birds singing in trees, smell the rosemary hanging over the walk as I brush through, taste tangy late cherry tomatoes, experience real-time temperature on my face.

All this without working up a sweat or worrying about whatever the mosquitoes are carrying this month.

Who needs reality TV, who has a garden? My rain gauge never makes anything up, never fails to amuse me over the “predictions” that are rarely precise in my garden. Top that, TV meteorologists!

Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to [email protected].