Hanging in there through dry August

It's record dry, but the beds look as colorful as ever. The picture here is of a bed we call the "well bed" (because that's where the house well sits, not far from the blue spruce at the left). Now, I've been watering this bed every week or two. It's the bed that gets watered from the pond with the firehose.

Past the well bed, there's a dip in the land in which lies the pond. The pond is now quite low, maybe down five feet (1.5 meters), but because it's 12 feet deep (3.65 meters) it still has a lot of water in it.

Beyond that in the distance is a bed that I've given up maintaining. It's full of grasses and native perennials like Rudbeckia subtomentosa, a nice tall black-eyed Susan. This bed now has many weeds creeping in, but all we do is mow around it. (Our ambitions proved unsustainable.)

Amazingly, this bed is full of life and color, record drought not withstanding. Meanwhile, in our two acres of meadow, the plants are quite stunted, about half their usual height due to the extreme dryness. However, they are still blooming, but not staying in bloom as long as usual.

Below is Agriculture Canada's drought map to Aug. 14. As you can see, the red area marking record dry conditions keeps expanding.

Precipitation Compared to Historical Distribution (Ontario)

Drought update: Not whining, still watering

July precipitation report: We had more rain this month than in June: 6/10ths of an inch in the first week (in two showers), the same in week two (three showers), and the same once again in week three (delivered in two showers on one day). But over the past 10 days to the end of the month, we had only one small shower, with 2/10ths of an inch.

The cumulative effect of the extremely low rainfall since mid-May has now put us into "record dry" territory. (See the second dot near Hamilton on the map: that's roughly where we are.) I've never had to garden in a drought like this. It was almost as bad in 1998, the first year we were here, but at that season, we had no gardens yet.

Despite the bad news, I've been in good spirits lately, probably because it's been reasonably cool, especially at night, and at least until now we've been spared the nasty humidity that we normally get. I'm no meterologist, but I suspect that the dip in the jet stream that we've had over southern Ontario more or less all summer long has kept both the humidity and the big thunderstorms at bay. Both have certainly been plentiful south of the border.

Semi-circular perennial bed at the end of July
At this point instead of whining, I simply keep on watering. The end result is that the garden, which I've designed for maximum color and interest for this time year is actually looking pretty good.

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.

Drought update: watering with the fire-hose

Still horridly dry: the map above tells the story. Yellow means low, orange very low, and brown, extremely low. The full map with legend is at the Agriculture Canada site. I added the dot for Hamilton, Ont., close to where we are in the "extremely dry" territory.

So far this month we've had two rainfalls. Both came with thunderstorms and both were a huge disappointment: the first brought 3/10ths, and the second 4/10ths of an inch. This puts us under an inch of rain for the month. I've never experienced a June as dry as this one.

There is another cold front coming through and there's a 60% probability of precipation, according to the forecast. But the rainfall will be likely be spotty; they say 2-4 mm, which is nothing, when you need at least two inches.

I watered quite a bit during the day today, drawing down the cisterns, so that they can collect rain water if it does indeed come.

Here I am wielding the fire-hose.
This evening we decided to get out the pump and fire-hoses and water a couple of huge beds around the house from our pond. It's a lot of work taking the pump to the pond, priming it, and getting 150 feet of heavy-duty hose set up, so we don't do it until necessary; plus we don't want to draw the pond down too much.

Let me tell you: there's a lot of satisfaction wielding a fire-hose to water the garden: you can just pour it on! On the off-chance that we do get one of those thunderstorms that bring two inchs of rain, the pond will fill back up again. Right now, it's only down a couple of feet, but there's still a long, hot summer ahead. I think we took six inches of water off the pond this evening.

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?