Hello August: Will you be as soggy as July was?

My husband said yesterday: "I'm so glad it's August and the beginning of the end of summer." A minority opinion, I'm sure, but we both prefer the fall over summer, that is, a normal hot and humid summer. This season it's hardly been hot at all. We've had only one day over 30C (86F).

Click on photo to see it larger

The Agriculture Canada map of Ontario's precipitation since April 2009 tells the story: except for maybe a week or two in June, it's been wet all the way. (That area of deep blue denoting "extremely high" rainfall amounts at the tip of Lake Ontario is where we are located.)

I have never seen the gardens and lawn areas here so lush at the beginning of August. I have also never had to mow as much. Last week I mowed the lawn around the house on Friday night, and it needed cutting again on Monday night. That's just three days - during which we got almost four inches of rain.

How green is my lawn? After last weekend's torrential rains,
this little flood pond appeared and disappeared in a few hours

Aside from fungal diseases showing up on the leaves of some plants, peonies and serviceberries, for example, and tomato plants that look pitiful and are bearing hardly any fruit, I don't have much to complain about. I don't even mind that the meadow flowers are a week or two late - that just extends their beauty. This is not like a drought season, when I question whether gardening is even worth the effort.

The meadow last week - Monarda didyma (in the background)
is still in bloom. Normally it would be finished by now

Here's a hilarious picture that my neighbor sent me yesterday. How do you like these new shoe styles for a wet summer?

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Not quite biblical, but close

While my husband is off on a holiday attending a summer music school (furthering his violin-playing hobby), we email each other daily. I was telling him how lush and green the lawn is and that I have to mow every four or five days. This is unheard in a normal August, not to mention during the kind of drought we had last summer when we hardly mowed at all.

This was his response:

Now you don't water, you mow. Such is the life of Eve tending to Paradise. -Adam

Here's what the rainfall map from Agriculture Canada looks like now:

In just a month, we have gone from "very low" to "very high"
(Click on map to view bigger)
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

What a rainy month July has been!

In June I was concerned that we would have another dry summer. We didn't get enough rain through April and May, and that was exactly how last year's severe drought started.

Well, what a difference a few weeks makes! The lawn is growing as fast and as lush as it should have done in the spring. At that time, it was so dry that the grass didn't need as much cutting as it usually does.

Mowing tends to slow down in mid-summer, but now we're cutting the grass every four days. That's never happened at this time of year before. The grass is thriving, but my tomato plants (all four of them, what's left of my veggie-growing career) appear to be sulking. The rest of the garden looks very happy, and, of course, the weed population is exploding, and that's keeping us busy.

Here is the Agriculture Canada rainfall map up to the end of July. We are now in the "high" precipitation zone, and for once I can say that we've had more than enough rain.

Click on map to see larger
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

This summer and last year: what a difference

As you can see from the rainfall map that Agriculture Canada puts out, this season, which started out quite dry, is now nice and moist. The city of Hamilton, and areas to the east like Grimsby, have had too much rain recently, but here it's been just right. The excess rain of the past week has actually made up for the dryness we experienced before it came.

Compare that to last year's picture, which I posted here at the end of July, 2007, when we were in the midst of a deavasting drought:

The end result: finally a summer I can enjoy.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Rolling thunder, one storm after another

Instead of the usual dreaded July drought, we are being treated to lots of rainfall. Last night's rolling thunderstorms - there were three in row - netted another 1 and 3/10ths inches of rain. It's quite the contrast to last summer's endless drought.

Our local paper, the Hamilton Spectator, reports that 80 percent of the rain that the city of Hamilton has seen so far this month fell over a three-day period from July 19 to 21.

The city did get a few more storms than we've had here. They've had almost too much rain. However, here just outside the city I'd say we had barely enough rain until now. The rain over the weekend and last night's thunderstorms have finally brought us really moist conditions.

Typically, the Spec reporter sees rain as a blight, and describes last summer's devastating drought as "relatively dry summer":

"A total of 250.2 millimetres has fallen since May, to the delight of gardeners but few others. Last year, a relatively dry summer saw only 93 mm dumped on Hamilton from May through July."

Well, what can I say? I'm a gardener, and, yes, I'm delighted with all the rain.

Toby checking out the high water at the creek which flooded briefly and covered our bridge early this morning
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

The rain, or lack thereof

I've been taking stock of the rain so far this spring, and we're in a deficit...again. After a winter of very good snowfall, the second half of April was too warm and dry.

May turned cool and gave us some good rains in the first two weeks, but after that nothing measurable until the end of the month, when we had a thundershower that netted 3/10ths of an inch. According to my records, we had under 2-and-a-half inches of rain in the entire month.

You expect dryness in high summer, but it's disappointing when it's too dry so early in spring. Last year was the same. Let's hope the weather pattern changes now that it's June. There is rain in the forecast for tomorrow.*

Here's how the Ontario precipitation map looks covering April 1 to May 29:

We are in the "very low" region at the tip of Lake Ontario

*It rained on June 3rd, but just 4/10ths of an inch. Better than nothing, but we could use more.

© 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 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.

For Ontario weather geeks only

If you're a weather geek like me, and you live in Ontario, you may be interested in the link below. It takes you to a summary of precipation for June, which saw some northern parts of the province with abnormally high amounts of rain, while the southwest (where we live) got abysmally low amounts.

The following quote is from Environment Canada's Ontario Weather Review - June 2007, where you can find the numbers for the city nearest to you.

Did this June seem a bit warm to you? You're right - it was.

Temperatures across the province were warmer than normal and in some cases two to three degrees above the standard. In general, Northwestern and Central Ontario had the warmest temperatures, but some locations in Southern Ontario were toasty as well.

Unlike June of 2006, the precipitation tended to be wetter than normal in the north. Like last June, though, it was drier than normal in the south. The higher-than-normal precipitation values were largely due to series of thunderstorms that dumped large amounts of rain in short periods of time. Dryden, one of the wettest locations, had four days where the daily rainfall was greater than 20 millimetres, with one of those days exceeding 40 millimetres.

Here's what the site had to say about the amount of rainfall in Hamilton, the city closest to us:

Precipitation in millimetres: 32.6
Normal: 83.9
Difference: -51.3
Driest Since: 1991

By the way, this is generous, as it puts the city at about 1.1 inches of rain. Where we live, west of the city, we had less than an inch all month.

Drought stress - the bane of my gardening life

When it comes to drought, I don't know who suffers more, me or the plants.

When it gets really hot and dry, I actually get what I call drought stress, which shows up as insomnia, depression, even high blood pressure, believe it or not.

We've now been at this country garden thing for nine years - we moved here exactly nine years ago yesterday - and most of those summers have been lacking in enough rainfall. Having a huge country garden and being on a well doesn't make watering easy.

There's no irrigation system, but we have hundreds of feet of hoses that we can drag around - one of my least favorite jobs. We also have inground cisterns that collect rainwater from the roof of both the house and the barn. When it doesn't rain for weeks on end and we get desperate to water the plants, the cisterns can be filled with trucked-in water. Last summer, I bought five truckloads of water at $115 a pop.

Most of our plants are tough, drought-tolerant perennials and grasses, so we water only the plants that need it: new perennials, trees and shrubs, the rock garden, the shade garden and certain sun-drenched areas that get fried. We don't water the lawn: there's too much of it.

The trouble is remembering where the new plantings are: they're spread out all over the place, a new tree here, a new shrub over there, and odd patch of annuals and perennials in this bed or that one.

This year I'm determined not to let drought get to me, but it isn't easy. Already we've had a record dry spring: little rain in the latter part of April, with none at all in the first half of May. A few thundershowers brought the total for May to just under two inches. The landscape isn't looking too bad yet because we had a wet fall and reasonable snow cover over the winter.

With this dry trend, I'm not looking forward to the rest of the summer (I hate heat and humidity too). I can only hope the tide turns. My problem is this: I'm a perfectionist, and there's nothing like drought to make a garden look sad instead of thriving. And that's really frustrating after spending all of April and May to get it looking great.

I guess these trials test if we really are devoted gardeners. On the battle of gardeners versus recalcitrant nature, one of my favorite garden wits, the acerbic Henry Mitchell, wrote:

"There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners and non-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones who ruin after ruin get on with the high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos and tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises."

For a change, Mother Nature, how about a little cooperation this season?