It’s a bit embarrassing talking about drought–or even dryness–when so many parts of the United States are truly parched.
It’s even worse to be wishing for rain when so many other areas are flood damaged.
But this seems to be the “new normal”–at least for the 4 plus years that I’ve been blogging. One of the themes of the blog is weather and I’m always writing about too much or too little of something.
Lest you think that I’m implying something here, I’m not. Any trained meteorologist will tell you that this is how we get our “averages.” At its simplest, you take a 70 degree day (“Wow, it’s way too cold!” ) and a 90 degree day (“Wow, it’s way too hot!) and average them together and you come out with the average for that day which at 80 is probably just about where that day should be.
Always remember 2 things: weather and climate are different. And if you can observe it in your lifetime, it’s weather and not climate, as the saying goes.
Last year, we were much too wet–and that seems to be the general pattern that is supposed to set up for the Eastern Deciduous Forest, which, broadly speaking, is the part of the country where I reside. The wetter places are forecast to become wetter still and the drier places, sadly, will become drier.
So presumably our arid summer is an anomaly. It’s also been mild, which has been lovely, because if it had been this dry and very hot, it could have been disastrous for the plants.
But when trees are losing their leaves–and have been for quite some time–very prematurely as that magnolia has been doing in the photo above-that’s how you know it’s much too dry!
Gardendaze 