The benefits of rain

After several years of drought (quite severe), it's been a relief (a joy, really) to be able to be away for a few days without coming home to drought-stressed plants (vegetables and containers, window boxes, and hanging baskets).

It's early in the growing season, to be sure, and we've got LOTS of hot weather ahead, so I'm still working with an array of drought tolerant species in my containers.

But I do hope that we'll have a respite from the unrelenting drought of the last decade or so, minus a year or two!

Finally a prospect of some decent rain

Gardeners and naturalists are almost as keen as farmers following the weather. Where I live, garden, and pay attention to the natural world, we're in the center of quite a severe drought.

We normally get fairly even rain throughout the year, but not for the past ten years or so, except for one year (the year the front meadow looked especially fabulous, with moisture-loving Joe-Pye weed and huge Blazing Stars (Liatris spp.)

And the last two summers have been truly exceptional (note the current rating for the dark red area- ugh). I've marked where I live with the arrow!

But Tropical Storm Fay is bringing some decent rain, even to us in Upstate South Carolina. I'm sorry for the flooding in Florida, but we'll be thankful for the downpours that are predicted for the next few days.

Finally a thunderstorm...

It's hard to overstate our drought here. We haven't had more than a small amount of rain since mid-May (1/2 inch, tops, in our garden), and normal rainfall is about ~4 inches a month. We're 10 inches behind for this calendar year, and over 20 inches behind, for the last year & a half or so.

So, it's cause for excitement when a potential thunderstorm actually materializes (this is a normal occurrence in 'regular' years). Summer thunderstorms are very spotty in their distribution and rainfall amount.

We just had over 1/2 inch in about 20 minutes. What a relief to have something. And the clouds are dark with lots of thunderstorm possibilities predicted for tonight and the rest of the week.

Any bit helps plants, animals, and insects parched from lack of rain. I've just see the male hummingbird check out the vines (for insects?) near the window twice on his 'trapline' around the feeders, even in the rain.

Rain and thunderstorms

I still haven't replaced the rain gauge by the main vegetable garden, but the birdbaths serve as crude measures of how much rain we've had. They're full right now, hooray! It's been dry the last couple of weeks, and the afternoon warmth has pulled additional moisture out of plants and soil.

But this morning, a big front is pushing through with lots of thunderstorm activity, and is periodically pelting down raindrops, alternating with light drizzle. I just looked at the U.S. drought monitor yesterday -- it's predicting continuing drought with improvement (compared to last year, anything is improvement). But I don't think non-outdoors-oriented people are paying attention to how the prolonged drought is affecting plants, not only in our gardens, but in natural plant communities.

My gardening companion, on a botanizing trip yesterday to get photos, reported that Steven's Creek and Savannah River Bluffs (two SC Heritage Reserve sites) were wonderful, with lots of spring wildflowers in bloom. He said, however, that Heggie's Rock, an interesting granite outcrop area protected by The Nature Conservancy, had been dramatically affected by the ongoing drought, and that the unusual plants there, adapted for the unique circumstances of the empheral pools that are characteristic of these plant communities, were barely evident, and there were many indications of drought-induced die-back in the vegetation. This is troubling for a plant community adapted to seasonal drought. Hopefully, today's rain will pass through that area as well.