Here in the PNW it is gorgeous. Mid 70's today....should hit close to 80 tomorrow. Sunny and clear - not a cloud in the sky. We had a decent downpour a couple of days ago but I still had to water all my container plantings yesterday. Wonderful gardening weather :-))

My area of NJ is much like your MD, sam; hot and dry. I'm going to have to water tomorrow. They are predicting rain for Monday, but only showers.

We lucked out last Thursday, the 30th...those weird, east-to-west moving thunderstorms parked over us a while. Got nearly an inch of rain in Howard County, MD.

However, not a drop since. The storms Tue and Wed both missed us just to the south.

I have this gut feeling we will see a mild but dry summer, kinda like 1997.

Most of april was warm and dry but the last two weeks have been colder than normal and lots of rain. And still frost some nights, that's not normal this far into may

Maryland doesn't even appear in the most recent drought map; it actually gets drier as you move north into the Northheast and New England. We went from a subarctics conditions in February, March and early April to subtropical heat in the blink of an eye. Normally, the period from March into May is quite mild and with periods of heavy showers. This year, as soon as the snow melted, the precip ended and then the early heat. I think the long range forecast of a cool summer (based in part on our past freakish weather patterns), is a joke. Our weather seems to be playing with new rules. These flash droughts have become a much more regular feature of the local climate. I hope we get some rain out of tropical storm Ana (itself, freakishly early as the season begins June 1st).

http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu

Yeah if we don't get some fairly substantial rain from Ana, it's hard to see how we are going to get caught up before what I call the "dry season" around here. From roughly late May to mid July, the typically mesoscale storms of that time of year tend to break up as they approach the very slightly cooler water of the upper Bay. There will be those storms that spawn in the mountains, blow up over Frederick and Carroll counties, stay huge for Baltimore and western Harford counties...and suddently vanish west of Havre de Grace or Darlington. Happens ALL the time. The similar storms north of the Mason-Dixon have no trouble continuing right across Lancaster, Chester, Delaware Counties into the NJ pine barrens. It's...California's dry summer season on a microscopic scale. Yes, those are the days when the high here will be 3-5F cooler than Baltimore and environs...there has actually been a summer when a local wunderground station did not go above 90F. OTOH, any and all synoptic scale weather disturbances from mid July to, really, mid October at least, will have enhanced rainfall because the Bay becomes relatively warmer than adjacent land areas. I jokingly call that "monsoon season" LOL. You can even have, during those minor low pressure systems caused by the breakdown and NE-ward shifting of a Bermuda high, storms spawn in a NW trajectory over the Delaware Bay, then cross the relatively narrow upper Delmarva into Cecil County. They get a boosting from topography that they don't get further south.

So, there's never been a year (since I've been here) that at least 2 out of the 3: July, August, or Sept didn't have good rains. (4" or more) However again it's depending on synoptic scale events...so if they are oddly absent, it can be really dry as one September was.

Weather babble aside, the main annoyance ot the dryness so far is the damn POLLEN! I normally don't have a problem with so-called allergies, but I feel like I'm living in some kind of pollen dust bowl now. It's beginning to bother me even in the house, there's so much of it! Finally having to switch on the AC a couple days ago helped a little because I guess the air filter caught some of it.

It's times like this that I'm glad I have a clayey loam and not a sandy loam. If you dig down 10-12", the soil is still moist even under trees, though not for much longer, from the heavy storms we got in April. I haven't had to water anything that's been in the ground for a year or more - yet. But I will on Tuesday if Ana doesn't pan out. Tom Tasselmyer - who's the only Baltimore weatherperson intelligent enough to realize we actually need rain - wasn't sounding very optimistic yesterday. Neither is the Philly NOAA Forecaster: WE WILL MENTION ONLY A 30 PERCENT CHANCE OF SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS. THE MODEL GUIDANCE IS NOT PARTICULARLY BULLISH WITH RAINFALL AMOUNTS.

BTW, fortunately, I don't think - from my 25 years of gardening somewhere in the DC or Baltimore areas - that spring dry spells are very correlated to summer ones. However, the longer we go on like this the more likely they will be...of course. But I remember even as recently as spring 2013 it got very dry for a while, then we had a wet summer. But that was dry from mid March to late April IIRC. (edit: I just checked...it actually stayed dry for most of May, too.)

At least there is a rain somewhere in the eastern 3rd. Where you get worried is when the qpf is showing no rain anywhere nearby. But I'm going to start watering this weekend based on what I'm seeing, the models now seem sure Ana is going out to sea south of VA Beach and aren't really predicting any rain in the next 5 days for most of MD.

2013 was a weird year, David. We were dryish in spring, but then VERY wet for June and the first half of July...then...NOTHING. It was as if someone turned off the spigot all of August and the first half of Sept. We didn't get a REAL soaker until we then got 6 inches in October.

Drought or flood - that's how I describe Maryland rainfall to my Ohio gardening friends. Even though our average annual rainfall of ~41" appears on paper to be nicely distributed at between 3-4" just about every month, the reality is much different. It may AVERAGE out to that, but it usually works out more like this...

Let's take June. One year we get 0.4", the next, 6.5", the next, 2.2", then 4.3", etc. It might average out to about 3.9", but rarely ends up there, it's usually well below that or well above.

It does seem that very few in the Baltimore/Washington area are as concerned as we are about dryness - but starting in April I got worried. We didn't really get our typical spring soaker-type rainstorms at all, and the ones we did get underperformed. Overall, we did OK with several thunderstorm events, but the PATTERN seemed "off" to me. The fact that Dulles Airport is below normal for the YEAR also doesn't seem to bother anybody, possibly because DCA and BWI are normal to above.

I'm surprised the drought map doesn't show anything in VA or the Appalachians in "abnormally dry" yet, since IAD as well as Hagerstown are below normal precip for the entire year so far.

May isn't looking good, either. We missed ALL the storms this week, Tuesday's went JUST south of Columbia, MD, and Wednesday's were south and west of here. That does seem to fit the idea that drought is building in from the North this year.

Justin Berk per his facebook page, does seem concerned about lack of rain, but Capital Weather Gang (DC based) does not.

It's true cool water, compared to the land temp, suppresses convective rainfall, but for the Chesapeake Bay, that reverses in late summer thru the rest of the yr & precip moving north up the Bay in late summer/autumn gets invigorated & help give the "northern Bay" area & the Susquehanna drainage the highest avg rain for the state other than high-elevation Garrett Co areas.

To emphasize hair's point, here's my precip values for Sept starting in 2004 thru last Sept:

7.54", 0.51", 3.88", 1.78", 4.35", 1.44", 4.54", 8.52", 3.87", 0.84", 2.02" -- avg 3.57"

Rather dry here, but there's an advantage for trees/shrubs -- the emerging leaves are not as prone to spring fungal infections that can damage the leaves' appearance for the rest of the season.

According to the long-forecast, I will likely evade a late-season frost that often happens here.

Good point, beng. The Sycamore anthracnose this year appears to be on the mild side compared to the last few years. That said I recall 2014 wasn't that bad either. 2013 was horrible.

Last spring, the anthracnose was bad on a lot of the oaks too, which I haven't seen any evidence of this year. Very little anthracnose on a sugar maple that usually gets infected pretty badly. And that black spot fungus on red maples doesn't seem to be making an appearance this year.

beng, yeah this pattern of coastal areas vs. interior areas, and patterns of summer rainfall is found elsewhere on the east coast and gets more pronounced with colder water.
Worcester, MA, JJA rainfall: 4.19 4.23 3.71
Nantucket, MA, JJA rainfall: 3.49 3.09 3.91
In fact comparing the UK to Seattle, for instance, part of the reason the UK has substantive summer rainfall while the PNW does not is the warmer Gulf stream waters allow the development of convection more readily than the cold California current waters off WA & OR. Current sea temp at Port Angeles is 46F, and off the west coast of Ireland it is already 52F; keep in mind Ireland is quite a bit further north and would be at the equivalent latitude of Port Charlotte Island. Almost 400 miles further north. Another one I found: the northern most sea buoy in Portugal is now at 60F; the same latitude in California is Eureka, where the water temp is 50F.

hairmetal:
in my opinion (and I read something similar from a real climate expert) the lower mid-Atlantic is in a kind of quasi "horse latitudes" when it comes to summer rainfall. Generally speaking there is that very reliable storm track across the Ohio Valley, through PA, and into southern New England and the NYC metro. Even closer, I cannot tell you how many more storms seem to track across south central and SE PA but miss MD. I've joked with a friend that the Mason-Dixon is some kind of force field that keeps storms north of Maryland. I wish NOAA or Department of Agriculture had plotted the already existing standard deviation figures of summer rainfall onto a colored map; I'm sure we'd find as your past experiences show that summer rainfall in Ohio is generally more reliable than the DC/MD/VA area. Even locally, for example, I remember the SD figure for Newark, DE, was much lower than Aberdeen, MD and Chestertown, MD. You also spot it in the all-time minima by month: north of the Mason-Dixon it gets harder to find record minima that would be really plant punishing, like <= 0.5 inches.
OTOH once you are into North Carolina or thereabouts, it seems like there is more of that "Gulf and Atlantic humidity overspreading the south" kind of pop-up and small MCC activity. Even Norfolk seems to get that early in the summer: their June rainfall is 4.26 inches versus Baltimore's 3.27. Quite a difference. But of course parts of the south can have really bad droughts when conditions permit, like the one in Georgia a few years ago that almost emptied Lake Lanier.

Couple semi-useful maps for this discussion:

http://www.nrdc.org/health/climate/images/drought_large.gif
and (although kind of focused a doomsday scenario, points out it would be almost impossible in the NE)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BwdTW7_IUAAB_Qf.jpg

Oh well, better go start watering!

Contrary to popular belief, April tends to be dry east of the mountains. This April was quite wet and cool/cold. As soon as the calendar switched to May, we started hitting 80s consistently. I don't think we've hit 90 yet but I could be wrong as I'm out of town. The trees are finally fully leafed out. Such a prolonged spring this year. Pollen lasted forever.

David-

Those maps confirm a few thoughts of mine as well as my experience:

Minor/short term droughts (D0 and D1 on the drought monitor) in the Mid-Atlantic are far more common here than Ohio, occurring somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic almost yearly, at least for a month or two. Severe, long term droughts, however are pretty rare, as is the case for most of the Eastern Seaboard. Our last really bad one was 2001-2002, and I lived in Ohio at the time (OH did have a moderate drought one of those summers IIRC). 2007 was fairly bad, but ended quickly with winter and spring rains in ’08. Ohio, however, is more prone to the droughts that spread from the Central Plains and those can be more severe than what we get in MD, especially in NW Ohio around Toledo, which tends to be drier than the rest of the state anyway.

Summer rainfall reliability – the Standard deviation issue is real – while average JJA rainfall in Akron and Baltimore is not all that different (around 4” for June and July and 3.5” for August, more or less), Ohio’s cooler summers mean more overall moisture stays in the soil (the difference is admittedly probably slight – temps only run about 5 degrees cooler), and our reality in MD is that 4” average for July really means about 3 years out of ten where we get 5” or more, 4 years we get under 3”, and a couple that might work out near “normal”. Ohio does see that but to a lesser degree from what I remember – except for 2003, when my backyard rain gauge in Akron clocked 11.23” of rain for July.

Although we’d all love to just have a nice 1” of rain every 6-10 days all summer, falling over a 12 hour period at night, with sunshine in between, it doesn’t ever work out that way. Reality is we’ll get 3” in a thunderstorm, then nothing for 3 weeks, but plenty of dreary days scattered within, with sprinkles or pathetic showers, where the average clueless Joe says “but it rained yesterday!” when I complain about watering the garden…but Joe doesn’t understand that the 0.02” of rain that ruined his son’s soccer game didn’t do jack squat for my plants.

Yes, amen to that hairmetal. I also hate how 90% of DC/MD weather forecasters, no matter how dry it gets (well, maybe not in 2002) will talk of any rain "ruining" the weekend or whatnot. People, if you don't want it ever to rain...by all means...please move to Arizona!

In North Central Texas, we're in Monsoon season apparently. We've been getting rain almost daily, and have had several tornadoes near our house. I wish I had planted more, because I have not had to water any of my new plantings which is very rare.

Last year we had a good soaker every 2 weeks from March-May. This year rain has been more sporadic, although until recently added up to sufficient amounts.

Here in Howard county, we did alright last summer until a brief dry spell in mid August when it started getting a little dicey. September was a little iffy in that again, we had some rain, but no real organized events, but ended up okay for the month.

The big picture to me is, in most of the "eastern third" if you correctly establish your plants, in good soil and on good sites, you should really not have bother with watering them very often...which of course isn't the same as never. I lived through 2002 with a much smaller garden so I can't really compare. However in 2010, 2011, and 2012 we had bad droughts and heatwaves and all my rhododendrons that were already established got through with almost no supplement water. Granted I'm already in a slightly favorable area for them...it might not have been the same with those plants in say Rock Hill, SC during a string of dry summers there, but the landscape appropriate plants down there...Pittosporum, Camellia, etc., would have been ok as long as they weren't in "hell strips".

Where I think there are problems are people who grow their plants like hothouse flowers frequently watering them and feeding them so they only establish the minimum root growth needed for anchoring. (if that)

I noticed that the rhododendron garden at Villa Taranto had a sprinkler system, in spite of being in a perfect climate with 80/60 summers and 7-8(!) inches of rain in the summer months. Like the Boy Scouts, I guess it's "be prepared". Granted it is very steeply sloped and on super well drained volcanic/mountain soil. So I guess they can have dry spells even there. Most of the major Ericaceous collections in southern England have irrigation too. (but I'm not sure about Cornwall, Wales and Scotland and it may well not be needed there)

And by plants of course, I mean permanent landscape plants. Obviously, annuals like tomatoes will always need water during dry spells.