Saturday, August 06, 2011

Wet Weather We'll See!

I'm getting pretty sick of being a slave to the water hose and watering can. Since June we have missed about every strom that has came up. This morning I was reading the Carolina Butterfly Society newsletter and a member in Raleigh was whining about the drought there. In the past few weeks every big storm that has came by dumped some good rains on Raleigh(hope his article was at least dated) and missed us entirely. This morning more rains passed through Raleigh and we got drops on the rain chains. Yesterday Charlotte (2.5 hours from here) got 6 inches in two hours, flooding in fact, we got nothing.

The heat, yesterday was reported to have a high of 88, first day in the 80s I can recall in sometime. Every week the forecast never drops below the 90s, we might be breaking an all time record for days in triple digits this year, we are very close. The news reported Raleigh(1 hour from here) has broken the record for 100+ degree days in a year and said that the hottest years in recorded history 5 of them have been in the last 10 years, due to all the concrete and buildings there.

On to brighter news I started the beehive because last year we did not get one squash in the garden. Today I found over a dozen blooms on the summer squash that got planted late. I think it is 3 year old pattypan squash seeds, Meg planted it under the pea trellis with Kentucky Wonder beans which are doing great too. This 7 foot trellis I have been hand watering 5 gallons a day from the rain tote under the deck. I believe the upper rain tote is empty or very close to empty. Hoping the rain today will fill the rain totes back up, we can store 600 gallons of water in them combined.
Pattypan Squash, we hope to find out. Pattypans are my favorite squash!

here is our pond, drying up pretty fast, the brown you see is mud. The water lilies are out of control, bad mistake to put them in the pond, we do see hundreds of flowers at times, this morning I noted 2 flowers under very overcast skies.

This blog is approaching 300 posts and 4000 comments (only 13 away from 4000). We made a milestone recently my garden art post from 2009 hit 2000 visits and installing rain chains made the top 10 all time posts, first post to reach that goal in the same year let alone month!

Currently Doppler Radar shows rains directly to the south of us, we might get some of this rain. Here is a link to the local doppler map, we are at the top center of the map.

12 comments:

Ginny said...

We woke up to two inches in our rain gauge! I hope you get some of the rain predicted for this afternoon and tonight. Even though we've had more rain than you have I'm really tired of dragging the hose around - with the high temps it doesn't take long for everything to dry out.

Randy Emmitt said...

Ginny,

So far about 1/8th inch here so far,see what I mean you get 2 inches we get 1/8th inch. Saw a Luna Moth fly by in the rain today, it was chased by a bird but not caught.

John @ Beans and I on the Loose said...

If the water lilies proved to be a bad mistake, would this be a good opportunity to remove them while the water is down?

Rohrerbot said...

Send some of that rain our way!!! We'd love some over here. The pond actually looks cool. I agree with Sinbad on the lilies....some mud boots and gloves to weed out some of them...not all:) However, they look nice in mass. Love your macro pic above. Really beautiful!!

greggo said...

Got 1.5 out of nowhere. just settled the dust, sort of.
congrats on the post number.

Randy Emmitt said...

Guys,
Getting the water lilies would be a huge effort, bet there's more than a ton of tubers under that mud.

Guess what the news tonight said Raleigh got 4.31 inches of rain today, us we got maybe 1/8 inch. A big cell just passed to the north of us, nada.

Janet, The Queen of Seaford said...

We got a whopping .44" yesterday when Charlotte got so much. It got dark and windy again today...but no rain. The stock ponds on the farms around here are like your pond...muddy.
Congrats on your comments and posting milestones. I am getting close to 300 posts too...though I will have to look to see how many comment I have.
Any thoughts about adding contact info on your blog? I set up a blog/facebook specific email address on mine.

Shady Gardener said...

I so hope you get rain. We are anticipating a rainfall before long... it's been about 5 weeks of Very Hot, dry weather. We did receive .2" of an inch during each of the past two nights!

Caroline Gill said...

Torrential rain here tonight, Randy, ... and cold rain at that! Wish we could send some in your direction. Thank you for your kind comment ...

Andrea said...

Randy, we are getting most rains which are supposedly yours! We have floodings, landslides and flashfloods in some areas whenever these torential rains come. It hasn't been like that before. And the bad thing is we only get rains when there are typhoons, so they are directly correlated. And their destructions are separately done!

I taught my mother to hand- pollinate our squash so we get fruits even if we dont see pollinators, or we get fruits as long as we can see a male flower.

Les said...

I hope you got rain, but not like they did in Charlotte.

Lisa said...

Oh, dear, count me among the whiners with typical mid-to-late summer drought. Hope you'll get some relief soon.

Lisa