Oh summer, will you make an appearance soon?

Since we moved here 11 years ago, our summers have been dominated by drought. Indeed, the worst drought in 50 years plagued gardeners and farmers throughout 2007. So it feels really odd to be experiencing the second wet summer in row - at least so far.

According to the local paper, we had 30 percent more rain than normal in June and temperatures have been an average 1.5 degrees cooler than normal. So far, we've had only one day that was hotter than 30 C (86 F), and no smog days.

All of this means that garden and crop plants are about two weeks behind when they would normally bloom or ripen. Our serviceberries are usually ripe on the shrubs in late June, but this year I was picking them in July. The cool weather and excess rain affected local strawberries, which weren't very sweet or plentiful. In our garden, the time I've been saving on watering is spent mowing because the grass never stops growing, and needs cutting every four or five days.

All in all, I'm happy to take this over a hot, humid, dry summer, but I wouldn't mind a bit of warmth. It was so cool the other day that I changed into my winter uniform: a black turtleneck sweater and jeans. But I'm not complaining, except about the strawberries.

(The link for Agriculture Canada precipitation map is here.)

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Soggy Canada Day

We've had a lot of rain this week. More flooding down at the creek today, as we got our second inch in as many days, and the ground was already sodden with the 2.25 inches from last Thursday. And to think I was complaining about the lack of rain just before this wet week started.

Which would you rather have: too much rain or drought? I'll take this over the once in 50-year drought we endured in 2007.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

It really should stop raining now

We are in the "Very High" region between London and Toronto
Click on map to see it bigger
Here's the Ontario precipitation map up to Sept. 13. What a contrast to last year's drought from hell! We're wet and soggy again, and it's been like that for weeks.

It rained on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, about two inches worth, including Hurricane Ike leftovers. On Thursday, before all the rain started, we laid some sod to patch up an area near the laneway where the grass has died in last summer's drought. We were happy not to have to water the sod for the last four days.

There's a lot of lawn on our 10 acres, and I seem to be spending all my gardening time mowing. Although the grass was very high today, the ground was too soft and wet for the ride-on mower, so I'll try tomorrow. I'm relieved that we didn't get as much rain as my friend in Michigan. She reports eight inches over the weekend, and says she doesn't ever remember so much rain in such a short period of time. Before the recent rain, her part of Michigan near Lansing was in a drought.

From drought to record rainfall - what a difference!

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Stormy Saturday: more staggering rainfall

Pinch me, I can't believe we got so much rain this week.

Today's severe thunderstorm brought almost 1 and a half inches of rain. It was quite scary when torrential rain turned to hail for a few minutes and a hurricane-like wind whipped through.

I was out on the front porch with the camera when a particularly nasty thunderclap sounded right on top of the house, so I ran back in. I heard later that my neighbour was so frightened she went down to her basement. Amazingly, no big tree limbs came down here.

The view from the front porch during the storm
As someone who got shell shocked by last year's record dry summer, I wasn't expecting any better from this summer, especially when May and June started off almost as dry. So this soggy July, the wettest we've experienced in our decade here, is quite a surprise.

Total rainfall this week: a shade over 4 inches. That's more than we got all last summer. The lawn looks awesome (you can't even see the creeping Charlie, at least not in the picture). I've never seen the grass this lush in July. There's a lot of mowing in my future.

After today's and the week's storms: the lawn all greened up again
The semi-circular perennial bed after the storm
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

A great weekend of rain

Rainbow from two weeks ago
I was beginning to get cranky about the lack of rain - no rain for two weeks. On top of that we're in the middle of heat wave that looks like it's going to stretch through another week.

Then last night came relief in the form of 1 and 3/10ths inches of rain, delivered nice and gentle through the night. Today stayed humid, but remained overcast so plants and people (me at least - and also the garden club folks from Mississauga who came for a tour) enjoyed a respite from the heat.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Bloomsday highlights and amazing thunderstorms

Peonies and allium seedheads before the storm
Why is it that we get the worst thunderstorms when the peonies are in full bloom? This is just rhetorical question: I'm not complaining, really!

Who could complain when Sunday night's rolling thunder revue (my dog's least favorite light and sound show) brought us three or four thunderstorms in a row? Well, I could take issue with the 15-minutes of pounding hail. Our precipation total that night: one-and-3/10ths inches! Amazingingly enough, the hail damage is minimal. Even the big hostas have just a few holes in their leaves.

The rain has made all the plants put on a growth spurt, especially the giant hostas. Everything looks 100 percent better, particularly the lawn, which I care about despite all the anti-lawn sentiment out there. (What other ground cover sets off flower gardens on an acreage as usefully as lawn? If I didn't have lawn, I'd have weeds.)

Peony with Anthriscus sylvestris 'Ravenswing'

Verbascum 'Polar Summer' with irrigation running before the rain
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

It really did rain...

It rained last night - a thunderstorm that got my dog a-panting and hiding under the table. The total: 6/10ths of an inch.

With the rain we had earlier, we've in good shape again: the cisterns that collect rainwater from the house and barn roofs are full. For the moment, the grass is green and beds are radient with peonies and Siberian irises. Contentment reigns (or should I say "rains"?).

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Six men, three big trucks, two small trucks

Waiting for the new transformer box
That's what it took to get our place humming with power again. Last evening, we had dinner with my in-laws (it was my mother-in-law's 80th birthday). During dinner there was a thunderstorm with rain (a cause of great joy), but when we came home, our power was out.

We went to bed without calling Hydro because it looked like the neighbor's power was out too, so we assumed they had called. Usually, if it goes out, the power is off for just a couple of hours, but this time, we still didn't have power in the morning. I called Hydro, and when they showed up a couple of hours later, they discovered that our transformer was fried: probably a lighting hit last evening.

Lifting the new transformer into place
So they came back a couple of hours later with a small army to replace the green transformer box - free of charge! (I remember what it cost when we put it in 10 years ago, replacing an ugly transformer on a pole and burying our line to the road.)

Now our place is humming again. What did I miss most? Not air conditioning, but the Internet. I can't live without my computer and the web.

After all that, the amount of rain we got was small: only a 4/10ths of an inch, but better than nothing. Today was a scorcher of a day, and so far a number of the thunderstorms have passed us by.

Over the weekend, my friend in Michigan reported more than 2 inches of rain on Friday, and 2.5 inches on Saturday. There's no justice: many states are getting too much rain, even flooding, and even northern Ontario is getting more rain than needed, and we're still high and dry. So it goes.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Oh, happy day! Plenty of rain

Here's what we got today: one and a quarter inches of rain. Put that together with the half inch we had early in the week, and it totals one and three quarter inches for the week. What a blessing after our hot and dry start to the season in April!

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Rain update - a good total for the week

Things are looking up: the past week brought us 9/10ths of an inch of rain over two days. It's amazing how quickly the lawn responds and starts looking good again. (Yes, unfashionable is it may be, I care about my lawn too.)

The fall colors are coming on in the trees and shrubs, and they are looking pretty nice, not just brown, as I feared. Still, the general dry trend continues, and next week's predicted daily high temperatures are around the 24-degree Celcius mark. That's 10 degrees above normal. (For you F-folks, that's 75 degrees, and almost 15 degrees warmer than is normal for the first week of October.)

It may be October in a couple of days, but that darned summer just won't quit.

September = new beginnings

As September arrives and the gardening season begins to wind down, there's beauty in the fading away, such as these prairie coneflowers from our meadow. I belong to a camera club and a few of us got together on Sunday morning to try to photograph monarch butterflies at the meadow. Alas, the butterflies eluded us, but the fading flowers were lovely. This was my favorite picture from that morning.

I haven't posted much lately, as we have started a major house renovation. We are getting a new kitchen (very exciting, as I've never had a great kitchen ever).

The complication is that we are moving the kitchen space to another part of the house and what was the kitchen until now will become a bedroom.

For various reasons - the kitchen move, repairs, updates, space for the fridge - five rooms are involved. We have done a lot of moving in the past few days, and the only livable space right now is the study, where we are sleeping and the living room. I have converted the main floor laundry room into a provisional kitchen, with microwave, kettle and coffee maker.

The old range is going down to the furnace room tomorrow, so I will be able to do more than microwave dinners. There are some nice garden fresh tomatoes begging to be made into sauce.

Wish us luck: by my birthday in mid-October, we should be ready to move into the new kitchen and updated bedroom.

PS: As for rain, we are still in drought mode. There hasn't been a drop since the wonderful rain on Aug. 25. The extended forecast shows dry, dry, dry to past mid-September.

Rain at last - we're cheering

View from patio on our back hill - note brown lawn in background
As many others were contending with record rainfall and flooding, we stayed dry. But today, we finally got a decent rain: 2/10ths of an inch overnight, plus 8/10ths this morning. And as I post this in the early afternoon, it's raining again!

In my neighborhood, we're all thrilled after a gardening season that turned dry in mid-May and stayed parched through the entire summer. As my neighbor Rose put it in her email to me just now: NICE RAIN, SOOOOOOOO HAPPY!!!!!

PS: Total rainfall from Thursday to today, 1 and 8/10ths of an inch (most of it today). This is most rain we've had in a week since April. Even the creek is flowing again.

Luck turning? Early morning thunderstorm

Click on the radar map to view bigger
4:30 a.m.: Wake to thunder and lightning and then finally some rain falling around 5 a.m. I take a cup of tea and sit outside on the front porch bench while it comes down. It feels like balm for the soul. When it's over, the rain gauge shows 3/10ths of an inch. More in the forecast for later this morning, around 11 a.m. We'll see.

10 a.m.: Another small thunderstorm cell passing through. We get maybe half a tenth of an inch more, which doesn't quite take the rain gauge to 4/10ths.

Meanwhile, south of the border, more reports of flooding through many parts of the American mid-west. It's hard to believe that we are still so dry.

My friend from Michigan reports:

There's massive flooding in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Ohio. Some parts of those states have received 14 inches of rain with 5 inches on Tuesday, alone. We are lucky to have been on the outskirts of the storm. it's hard to believe that you - in a rather direct line east of here, have no rain. I'm actually beginning to believe the US weather maps that have only white above
the northern US border. There is no weather in Canada, only hot or cold.

It sucks the life out of gardens and gardeners

Today I actually thought I was losing it. My impression of the last few days was that I hadn't watered a lot, and so I didn't bother to check the cistern before putting the sprinkler on my shade garden. As a result I almost burned out the pump because I let the water level get down to the dregs. This was the first time all summer I've made that mistake. I guess I'm pretty tired of it all, but I did call the Water Truck for a refill - again.

The picture above from Canada's Weather Network shows our 14-day trend forecast. You'll notice that it indicated rain for today. The day's done, as for the rain, well, you know the story: it didn't materialize. The rest of August looks equally dismal.

The title of this post comes from one of the kind comments I received from a blog reader in Washington. It's so true: drought will do that to you. I was interested to discover that mental health researchers in Australia have actually coined a word, solastalgia, for drought stress as it affects people.

PS: Here's a link to article about solastalgia as a human response to environmental stress by Glenn Albrecht, an Australian researcher in environmental health. It's a bit academic, but fascinating.

Monsoon season? Everywhere but here

Click on picture to view bigger size
I don't live by gardening alone, and so I follow quite a few blogs that have nothing to do with gardening. My favorite is The Online Photographer by Mike Johnston, who writes beautifully on photography and many other topics. Anyway, today he reports:

On the home front, here in Wisconsin it's monsoon season. We don't actually have a monsoon season, or at least not usually, but that hasn't stopped it from raining for three days straight...

Then my friend Sandy from Michigan emailed the following:

It's still dark and misty outside but I think the bulk of the rain is over for now. There were 4.25 inches in the gauge at 4:30. However, there is rain in the forecast for Tuesday as well as 90 degree temperatures by midweek. We were concerned because the sump pump has not engaged even once since the rain started. After checking, we found that the sump crock is still nearly dry! Weather report says the rain is related to the tropical storm (Erin) so maybe there's hope that you'll get a few inches as well.

What I wouldn't give for such a rain! Come on you folks south of the border: Why are you hogging all the rain? Send some up here.

Actually, there was some rain in southern Ontario today around the London area, but it didn't reach up this way. Tomorrow looks to be more of the same: a trace is forecast, but many inches are needed. The map above shows just how little rain there has been over the past 30 days.

So far in August we've had barely half an inch, and that fell within the first week. Since then: nothing.

Shower today nets 10th of an inch

I start the morning off by taking some pictures of the front garden, which is full of grasses and Russian sage. This picture, I take from the loft of the barn where we have a high window propped open so the barn swallows can fly in and out even when we have the barn doors closed.

As I set up my camera on the tripod, a pair of barn swallows gets the surprise of their lives when they find me at the window. Oooops: abort landing, bank sharply right and head for the open door below. Then, the chatter begins, and continues the entire time I'm up there.

The afternoon brings a shower, but very little rain: only 1/10th of an inch. We were going to get the firehoses out again to water the front garden, but we just didn't get around to it - it's a big and heavy job (now I know why fire fighters need to be so burly) - maybe tomorrow night. It's exhausting, all this watering.

Next chance for rain? The Weather Network predicts "a few showers" for Thursday. Yeah, right...

A closer view of some the front garden plants

How dry can it get? Evidently, much drier

Yesterday's rainfall amounted to 4/10ths of an inch in total, but it stayed cloudy, cooler and dampish all day, which was a blessed relief.

Here's the Agriculture Canada drought map for southern Ontario again, now updated to Aug. 6. Red means record dry, and brown extremely dry. (We are in the record dry patch under where it says "Toronto" - close to the tip of Lake Ontario.)

We're now in the middle of a heat and humidity wave that looks like it won't break for another five days. After that, the 14-day forecast shows warm and dry to August 22.

I hate to go on and on about drought, but unfortunately this summer it is the issue that dominates my life. I haven't given up fighting back with the hoses. Sure, my garden beds are filled with mostly drought-tolerant perennials and ornamental grasses, but even those plants can't keep going (let alone look good) when it doesn't rain for months. But what's really heartbreaking is what this extreme dryness is doing to all the trees and shrubs that I just can't water.

The bottom line: I can't wait for winter and a good, long break from all this. What a cruel summer for plants and gardeners! Of course, the farmers have it much worse. At least we gardeners don't depend on rain for a living.

Is it raining? Or am I dreaming?

We got almost half an inch of rain today (4/10ths of an inch). Earlier on, the forecast predicted lots more rain tonight coming with thunderstorms. Whether these materialize or not remains to be seen. At the moment - late afternoon - it looks like the potential for overnight showers might already have evaporated.

We weren't as lucky as London, Ontario, where my parents live. They had an inch-and-a-half today. What I wouldn't give to get that kind of rain! At any rate, the landscape is so dry now that any rain at all is a blessing.

The view from the front porch during the shower

More rain than we've had, but still very dry

We were off on holiday last week, so it was nice not to worry about rain, or lack thereof. It did rain here twice on Thursday for a total of 6/10ths of an inch, the most rain we've had in one day since about mid-May.
The map above (from the Agriculture Canada site) tells the story of the continuing drought. The red areas indicate record dry, and there's red spot close to Hamilton which is showing up where we are located. Brown means extremely low and orange very low.

There's no rain in the forecast for the coming week. If there is a silver lining, it's the relatively cool weather we've been enjoying. In New York City where we had our holiday, it was hot and steamy.

A little rain again

Today's rain was just 2/10ths of an inch. But maybe things will start looking up: at least there are some more showers in the forecast for the coming week.
Here's a recent picture of the four-square garden, which I've been watering faithfully. The lavender is in bloom and its scent is divine. But you can see how dry it is in the tree farm field behind my garden.

I haven't done a post on it yet, but the wonderful limestone sundial base in the picture was actually carved from three blocks of stone by my husband, John. It took him a couple of carving workshops (one in England and one in Vermont) and two years to complete. It is utterly wonderful. I'll write more about it soon.