too much rain!

[rainbowgardener]

As a gardener, I hate to say it, but I am really tired of rain and starting to worry about everything drowning and mildewing. We have had about 2.5 inches of rain already IN JULY (this is only the 6th!). Usually we would get 3.25 for the month. There is not a dry day in the forecast until a week from yesterday. By then, we may have hit our month's total. Mushrooms growing in the lawn and my plants and I are desperate for sunshine.

Rained from steady to HARD all day on the fourth of July. Light rain off and on all day yesterday, I put in work hours harvesting at the CSA in my rain poncho. Went out to feed the outdoor cats this AM and guess what, it was raining hard....

I hate to say it, because I know our friends out west are sweltering in record heat and drought. Instead of doing the tar sands pipeline, I wish some of all the engineer types would get busy trying to figure out how to pipe some of all this excess water out to where it is needed, instead of having floods here.

[webmaster]

New England is going through a heat wave/thunderstorm pattern. The rain we've been getting was dowright tropical, like buckets of water falling all at once. Seems like maybe it's passing now. Got my first green tomato forming earlier this week.

[rainbowgardener]

The good news is with all this rain, everything is growing like crazy. The bad news is that with all this rain, everything is growing like crazy, including the weeds. The good news is that the ground is so soft, weeds pull right out, even dandelion roots. The bad news is there is hardly any time to get out there and weed when it isn't raining.

[applestar]

I got used to not having to water the container plants, but it didn't rain almost this whole week and one of the plants was starting to wilt yesterday when I decided they really should be watered. Weird to have to water them while the ground has barely started to dry.

My butterfly weed in the backyard is yellowing. I think it got drowned. I clipped off three armloads of spotty or yellowed tomato leaves. One plant has not jut spots and yellows but browned dried up leaves all the way up above still green fruit trusses. I think that one's a goner -- hoping the fruits will color-break so I gave it another day. This has been an excellent test of disease resistance, though....

Unless the systems dry up between there and here, I suppose I'll be getting more rain in a day or two since its been raining there, rainbowgardener.

[tomf]

For two years in a row our strawberry season got rained out and the harvest was pitiful. The end of June got very hot and now that the 4th of July is over it may not rain much more this summer, the PNW has odd weather. Oh but the year I had to rebuild my roof it would not stop raining in the summer, normally summers are dry.

[!potatoes!]

we're at about 2x our average rainfall for the year. probably well above that, after the last week. a friend of mine got 6.5 inches of rain in 36 hours a few days ago. lots of folks worrying that their large tomato plantings are gonna get blighted real fast this year...