The plant available flavors of nitrogen that come from precipitation are nitrate and nitrogen. I don't have any numbers off the top of my head so I clicked on bi1 1me's link and the 1.2 mg/l of nitrate in the Eastern U.S. looks like a good number to use, since that's the highest of the group offered for nitrate. To convert mg/l to a percent by weight, just divide by 10000. (0.00012% nitrate by weight) Then I looked up average precipitation in New York and it's in the neighborhood of 50 inches a year. 50 inches of water stacked up over 1 square foot would weight 260.42 lbs. That means you would be getting about .00031 lbs. of nitrogen per sq. ft. over the coarse of an entire year. To put it into more common terms, about 0.31 lbs. per 1000 sq. ft., or 13.5 lbs per acre. Everything being middle of the road, that's probably about a tenth or so of the annual nitrogen requirement. But remember, that's at the high end of the nitrate in rain graph. I didn't look up anything for ammonium but my guess is that it's probably not a whole heck of a lot. In regards to environmental and human health concerns, I'm not your guy. Maybe Toxcrusader can chime in there.

Storm passed us completely by, though there were some beautiful thunderheads to the east. Not even a drop. Yay! I'm on the other side of the same coin, NJ. I can't conceive of it *not* raining in the summer. I frequently read in gardening books and even on GW here about not getting the leaves of certain plants wet. I've scratched my head for years. Doesn't rain get them wet all the time? We just got back from a road trip to Victoria, BC a few days ago. It doesn't really rain in the summer there either. It was extremely strange to see brown grass (where it wasn't irrigated) and occasional falling leaves and I was told this was normal in the summer. That just doesn't happen here except in drought years. We saw farms all over BC baling beautiful hay. They could cut and bale at the optimum nutrition level because they totally controlled the irrigation. Time to cut? Just stop watering. Take as much time as necessary to dry in the swath; heck, take a couple extra days to flip the swath and dry it through. It's amazing. We just can't do that here most years. Usually, when it looks like there's going to be a rash of a few days with no rain, farmers are dropping everything - even 9 to 5 jobs in town - to 'make hay while the sun shines'. Even then, it's unusual to get hay off with no rain at all on it. Most of the prairies here support "dry-land" farms with no irrigation setup at all. In an average year here, I only usually need to water the garden at the beginning, when seeds are close to the surface and yet to germinate. After they've established, I rarely need to pull out the sprinkler. There's at least an inch of rain per week or so and when there's not, the roots dig deep enough that they're good for a few more days until it rains again. This is only my second year doing dry bush beans, but I'm finding it difficult to mature them on the plant because of the short season and because the rain still comes in the fall, though less. Same for the pole beans, though, they're up in the air and do dry off a little faster. No rain in the winter - just snow, cold and more cold. We can go into the -30s Celcius for a couple of weeks at a time and -40 and below is not unheard of. I don't get to do cover crops. Typically, last frost is within the first week of June (or late May in a good year) and first frost is usually early to mid September (but can come as early as August in a bad year). We can extend harvest into early October by covering on nights where there's frost forecast. Crops mature, but don't really grow much by then. I've tried mulches a few times, but have discarded the idea. I know it's a great thing for many gardeners, but I find it cools the soil too much and there's not really a need to conserve moisture. Should we go back to drought years, I'd see about trying it again. Right now, though, I need heat heat heat to reach my soil. :)

Jim- That is a crazy pic of that bee impaled on that cacti! Never seen anything like that. That philodendron looks like a split-leaf philodendron. I grew a couple last year, and found 2 more at Lowe's at the end of the season for $3 on clearance. Great price for such big plants. A word of advice, they do appreciate some shade, and can definitely tolerate it if you have a shady spot where you need to plant something. Your Nainital is getting huge! I just planted mine in the ground the other day. I hope mine grows as fast as yours. Your Washys look awesome! I can't wait to receive mine from the mail man LOL. I'll have to keep my eye out for that cultivar of hosta. It's always nice to have hardy plants that only look like tropicals without any special attention. One last thing I was thinking of...be careful when planting running bamboo. I was out in my yard yesterday and noticed bamboo popping up everywhere. It can and probably will become invasive, even in zones 5 and 6. Very hard to get rid of, if not impossible, once you have it. Everything looks awesome.

They need the leaves to produce the energy to make the flavor. The same thing happens with other fruit, like blueberries - sometimes something goes wrong and the leaves fall off while the plant blooms and makes berries. Without leaves the berries rarely ripen and even if they do they have no flavor. I would look for the type of citrus with the earliest ripening schedule - probably some sort of Satsuma. Then try and plant them with a wall nearby for winter wind protection. My Owari Satsuma ripens around October, sometimes September and they are pretty hardy. I'm in zone 7b. We've had severe winters the last two years so I dug my trees up and keep them in pots now (they are small). I have to add that I spent my childhood living in Japan. My parents were from small towns here and dreamed of living in a large city/foreign country so back in the 60's we moved to the suburbs of Tokyo where I lived until high school. We weren't military but because of my dad's job we were allowed to go to school at the nearby Air Force Base. I loved living there and even now I consider Japan my "second" homeland.