I have an average of 18.35 inches per year (last 30 yr average). We got less the last 3 years. Rain is mostly Oct- April. Drip irrigation is really essential in the summer.

Yearly average here is 21.38 inches (45 years) with rain spread over the year. Oct-Nov are usually the wettest months (Spring). We have been rather drier in recent years and irrigation is needed over summer and autumn as well.

Oops, forgot to add, this year to date we have had 16 inches only, so will be well down on average unless the heavens send large amounts of precipitation in the next month.

Where I live at the base of the Adirondack Mtns, we are in a valley at the the lowest point. Actually only about 100' above sea level. Our avg rainfall is 39.35", which is 3.15" less than the rest of the state, and .18" less than the nationwide avg. This year was strange even for us. Came off a polar vortex winter with no rain mar-may, rained pretty much all of June, then didn't really rain again till Oct, and hasn't rained much up till now. We don't water any of our gardens (flower or veggie) other than when we plant out. They get watered every day by drip line for a week. After that, they're on their own. If I'd planted new roses this year, I might have watered them, but all my roses are firmly established, so the lack of rain doesn't affect them. Oh yeah, I should probably mention we live at the juncture of 2 rivers, our water table is very high here.

We get about 13 inches for an average. However, due to the drought, we have received less than that for the past four or five years or so. Most of our rain comes between Dec and March. We pretty much get no rain starting in the middle of May through October.

We normally get about 50 inches, but this year we've had more than 70. Even with that, it's so hot during the summer that watering is a must. I lose more roses during summer than I do winter.

Averaging about 4.5" annually, we have the lowest rainfall in the states among the major cities. Watering is a must....

Lynn

I live in eastern Sweden, a dry part of the country, much like East Anglia in UK. Annual precipitation 1961-1990 in Uppsala, my nearest meteorological station, was 500 millimeters (19, 68 inches) but we have been getting more rain in later years with a record 600 millimeters (23 inches) in 2014. March-June are the driest months, November-January the wettest but rain usually falls in every month. My deep clay soil helps plant to survive drought.

Ours here in North Georgia hovers around 100 inches for the past few years. I can't get the data for the drought years, but I am sure it was a lot less. Still, I have to irrigate my roses. Mostly because it does get so hot here and the sun is so strong that it dries out the plants and the soil.

Our "normal" annual rainfall here is about 35 inches. However, we have not gotten that for the last 4 years. Two years ago we got 10 inches, last year (I am using the "rain" years they use here - from July 1 to July 1) we got 20.

However, as you said, when the rain falls makes a big difference. Even when we are getting normal rainfall, 99% of the rain falls between October and March/April, with then a normal 5-6 months total drought, dry and with temps in the 80s, 90s, and a few 100s F. So, we have to irrigate during the summer no matter what.

They are predicting heavier rain this year - so far we are still way below normal to date, but it has rained once (about 1/2 inch a time) about every 7-8 days since Nov 1. Our irrigation has been off since then, Yay! I do think the "roses need 2 inches a week" saying is, like most old sayings about roses, wrong. Ours get by with way less than that when they are irrigated. Everyone around here is bracing for what the weather people claim will be flooding and huge "El Nino" rains, but so far not much.

Jackie

I believe we average about 40" (100 cm) annually, but suppose there's considerable variation from year to year. The last three years or so have been quite wet as well as mild; a few years earlier we went through a multi-year period of low rainfall and I became seriously worried about drought. Averages can be misleading. A couple of valleys over from here in the province they got a foot of rain in September, but it all fell in one cloudburst that lasted 3-4 hours.

We water the first year but not afterward; the bulk of the plants in the garden live their lives without supplementary water. Our soil is heavy clay with planting holes much amended with organic matter. We mulch and encourage a cover of grass and other herbaceous plants in the beds. We usually have a dry spell of two to four months in the summer, though the last two summers have been wetter, with plants growing correspondingly well. We always lose a fair number of plants the first year. If they can make it through the first year, I believe that very few die of thirst afterward. More common is plants that drown or succumb to disease in an exceptionally wet period, sometimes out of season. One thing that perhaps helps in a dry summer is that temperatures drop at night, and of course plants deal better with drought if they have some protection from wind and sun.

..in this Oceanic climate - Cfb on the Koppen Geiger classification system [so I just looked up - I had never heard of it].... and in my area specifically, we get about 22 inches rain per year, approx 2 inches per month, evenly spread, although history records that we can sometimes get 2 inches within 15 minutes....

...I think there's a high water table here, trees grow huge, and I rarely need irrigate - if I dig 2 foot down it's permanently moist..... I don't mind the climate...I think it's good for gardening generally, without extremes.... but I wouldn't want to be any further north than what I am now.... and would always prefer to be a little warmer....

We get about 12" a year here, and in this high altitude climate, it evaporates very quickly.

My own area averages 15" of rain a year, all falling during the winter half of the year. Annual rainfall typically swings wildly from about 5" to 25", but 15" is the average. I'm only an hour's drive from Jackie but the Bay Area has significantly varying climates due to the complicated geography of ocean, bay, fog, and low mountain ranges.

All of California has been in drought for the past four years. Our lakes and reservoirs are dangerously low. If we do get good rainfall (and I hope we do) it will be a welcome relief, but is unlikely to break a long term trend. Last year my region got 13", closely approaching average, but we are the only part of the state that did this well. We've been required to cut back our water use by 30%.

Yes, we do need to water roses to grow them, but I have found that I can water established teas, chinas, noisettes, and climbers deeply once every three weeks and they do fine. Young plants cannot get by with this infrequent water, of course. My more modern roses are planted in a different bed where they are watered every ten days.

My roses have never been watered to the level of two inches a week. I think that is completely unnecessary if one has a good clay soil, as I do. If a person gardens in sand, as those in parts of Florida and some other areas do, then the two inches rule begins to make sense. You must look at soil and water table as well as rainfall.

Not much as the rain goes around us. We can have a real bad thunder storm coming right at us and at the last minute it will open up and go around us. That is, a few blocks to the North and South it can be raining cats and dogs while our streets are almost dry. Same for snow, one year we got 1/2 inch while the rest of the area got 3 feet or more. Its been doing this for years so we’ve learned to live with it. The area is only a few blocks around us, maybe a 1/2 mile diameter circle. Crazy but it happens all the time. There have been times when we get 3 feet in one storm but that is very rare. Needless to say we use a drip system.

Great! Keep it coming folks. Lynn, this is what I would call an arid climate! Marianesse, Marlorena I wasn't expecting you're getting that little rain. Buford, WOW!

I get about 30" annual precipitation here but I'm in western Wisconsin near the Minnesota border which puts me just east of the N. American Great Plains where my weather patterns come from. Sometimes I have to irrigate my gardens because weather coming off of the Great Plains can be extremely variable with no mountains or large body of water to moderate the weather. 3 summers ago, I had a 10 week period from early July to mid Sept. where the total rainfall for that period was just over 1" with above normal temps., watered like crazy that year. This year I've had above normal rainfall with below normal temps. so I only watered twice & that was because I was applying fertilizer. My spring & fall temperature patterns also can fluctuate greatly. I remember a fall day that the temp. was around 65-70F in the late morning, about noon the winds changed to coming out of Canada, & when I came home from work at 5PM, the temp had dropped to about 15F. Makes rose growing interesting here at times.

Up until 2010 the average rainfall has been 15 inches in our area, but since then I think it's been about half that or even less. The soil is very porous and poor so that the rain doesn't help as much as it would in an area with clay soil. Native trees and other vegetation have died off in record numbers or are affected by diseases that have not occurred before and much of the wildlife has also been decimated. Without an artificial water supply it would be impossible to have a garden here and even a garden of native plants would be stressed.

So far this year we have received just under 9 inches of precipitation. I hope we can end the year with at least 9 inches. Average is about 9-10 inches per year. We irrigate, using a system of drip emitters and micro sprinklers, constantly during the growing season. Southwest Idaho developed because irrigation was brought to the Snake River Valley for agriculture and flood control. We depend on snow runoff joining rivers and collected in a series of reservoirs, which is dispersed in the end to canals and ditches. Some farm water is pumped directly out of the Snake River, for those lucky few holding early water rights. My step dad had first water rights out of the Snake, and he was one lucky farmer. City water is often pumped from wells, though, unlike irrigation water. Farmers also have their own wells for house water. Diane

So far this year 60.8 inches (according the rain gauge I keep in the back yard and record duitifully). Generally we get three or four inches in December, unless it's especially wet.

In the twenty some years we've owned this land, our highest daily rainfall was 5.6 inches one day in July.

Our problem is drought months- discontinuous months in summer with no rainfall. Our native trees can tolerate this; roses trying to get established can't.

A low rainfall year would be low 40's.

One side effect of months with eight inches of rainfall is loss of mulch- it doesn't float away, it rots away and may not do that much for the clay under it....it just goes away along with any N that might have been used on the beds.

I have problems with mulch washing away. The big flash flood of 2013 I lost all my mulch in the front and most in the back, although a lot of it was pooled on my side of the fence by the storm drain. Of course I had other peoples mulch in my yard. We had a really bad downpour the other day, I had to drive home in it, and again, all the mulch in the back is up against the fence by the storm drain. I'm going to have to do something about it. But luckily, the neighborhood drainage issues have improved since they put in the new drain pipes. My back lawn, but the storm drain is still a swamp, still settling and if we get a lot of rain, it sometimes swells up like a bubble. I feel guilty complaining since most of you get much less rain than I do. I guess it's either feast or famine.

Yes, it does seem to be feast or famine, and I was shocked at the amount of rain you receive, Buford (100 inches), which I cannot imagine. I would not want the flooding you describe at all, while here, it's range and forest fires (most acreage burned in the nation) that is to be dreaded. England sounds better every day. Diane

Approximately 27 to 28 inches. I water in summer but only if we haven't had significant rainfall for a while. I'm situated some 300m above sea level and the water table is low, and my soil is sandy, so when I do water I deep soak the roots, rather than use sprinklers. Our rainfall is spread fairly well throughout the year, being a little drier in summer, but the generally cool temps mean that my roses normally do just fine without supplemental water, unless the temps go up above 20 °C.

nan, I admit I was rather shocked. Originally I thought it was about 70, but I had the dates set wrong, only going through November 25th. So I have to assume that December is a very wet month here. As I said, we get our rain in bunches, usually downpours and lose a lot to run off. We rarely get nice soft rain for hours or days. Unless it decides to do that while I have lots of buds and then they never open.

really interesting thread. We have 26 inches here, Northern Germany.

We average around 48" annually, though last year it was only 36". It tends to dump heavily here all at once, so, of course there's lots of runoff, especially in my garden as it's pretty steep, though terracing does help.

A few other obvious things we have been reminded of in this thread which infuence the ability to garden without (much) supplementary water. Apart from distribution of rain through the year, factors that affect the resut is the usual way of delivering this precipitation (e.g. dumping vs sustained light rain or drizzle, vs snow), temperatures (I should also add sunshine and air humidity) through the seasons which influence both the plant needs and evaporation from the soil and, of course, type of soil and the inclination.

Still, I was surpised at some of the statements e.g. how little rain, comparatively, they get in parts of England or Germany, how much rain they can get in the south of Australia and how little rain they get in a part of a Great Plain State like Idaho - I always thought of these States to be wet.

Maybe when people stop posting in this thread I will calculate the average for the forum average yearly rainfall.. lol

My surprise echoes Nik's. I remember reading Henry Mitchell years ago who said that England not only has not enough sun, but not enough rain either. As was usually the case he knew what he was talking about.

With our steep slope I have an interest in retaining rain from a downpour, though it's not as common a form of precipitation here as in some areas (with climate change that may one day no longer be the case). We do some terracing, which helps. Also I wonder if keeping the ground well clothed with plants isn't useful. I remember first encountering this idea from some English writer, using a ground cover of low growing plants under roses and other shrubs. It discourages erosion, and the roots of annual plants become soil amendment after the plant finishes its life cycle--no digging! When I realized this I stopped pulling annual grass under the roses and just sheared it instead. (I still wage war on Bermuda grass.) Of course there's the downside of messiness, lack of air circulation, and competition where nutrients and water are limited, but keeping the ground covered with plants works in my garden.

Idaho is out West, not on the Great Plains. We're a few miles from the Oregon border. We are a combination of desert and mountains, plus lots of great farmland in the river valleys, and lots of cattle on the range land. For years, this area has been confused with other parts of the country--not quite Colorado (way east of us), and certainly not Iowa, which people often confused with Idaho--that got to be kind of a running joke around here. So often Idaho is the state that's neither here, nor there. I hope we come into our own some day. Diane

Speaking of downpours we're having one right as we speak.. It's the commonest form of precipitation down here.. I wish I could convey the sound I'm hearing right now. Nothing much remains of rose blooms after one. Even canes often brake. I think we'll pass that 400mm mark sooner than I expected.

In the link you can see the precipitation data for 2014 from the weather station a mile down the road from where I live. It is a fairly typical distribution through the year. Height is in mm but you can get the idea (1'' equals about 25mm). You can also see the temps in C. Highest was 39.6 (103.28 F) in June, lowest was 3.9 (39.02F) in Dec.
Data 2014

We have avg annual 40.48"=1028.192mm.

My nearest weather station is about 45 kilometres away. It doesn't tell me the annual average, but it tells me that in 2014 we had 18.7 inches.

Daisy

Here the annual average is 14.5 inches (37 cm), with virtually no rain, at all, between May and October (the length and severity of California's dry season exceeds that of Europe, which makes for some interesting ecological dynamics around the European exotics that have naturalized here). Two years ago we only got about 6 inches and that was hard indeed. Just 15 miles to the west, on the other side of some hills, they get double what we get (we are in a "rain shadow" here).

Apparently, our average annual rainfall is about 45", but I think records are kept at the airport in North Charleston, so that may be a bit low. It is usually pretty humid here since we're near the Atlantic coast (humid subtropical Köppen climate classification). Heat is reliable from April/May through September/October, but rainfall isn't so easy to predict.

My memory of summers in my younger days is of hot sun until mid-afternoon or evening when it would rain almost every day. Either things have changed, or my memory is faulty. Or- quite likely- both.

Virginia

I'm pushing REAL close to 70" already this year which in about the average up here for the year. I've still got December to go yet so I'll be a little over. Even though Buford only lives about 50 miles to the south of me, she gets a lot of rain during the summer that I only get a small amount of. The storms build up in the mountains and move down to the eastern plains of N. GA. with just the first part of the summer storms getting me wet. That's why she gets a lot more rain then me even though we live fairly close. Then there will be times during the summer when I won't see a drop of rain for 2 or 3 weeks. The red GA. clay will bake as hard as a brick. This is when I will have to hand water with my garden hose.

Between this thread and the way my roses have surged with the autumn rains, I'm beginning to suspect that most of my roses could do with more water than I've tended to give them. Possibly goes some way to explaining why the teas/chinas/noisettes seems happiest and why my Austins stop blooming for large parts of the summer...

Of course, that's doesn't mean I'm going to water much more, but it does mean I may extend my clay and mulch adding efforts and see what happens.
Considering the reputaion we have as being a damp, rainy country, it's astonishing how little comparative rainfall we actually have. I suppose the little and often quality of our maritime climate creates the impression and allows plants that would possibly prefer more water to get by.

Hi Ken, it's interesting that I googled the rainfall for Atlanta and got closer to your number. But when I went on the UGA site and put in my zip code, it went up. Maybe it's the proximity to the Lake, who knows.

fduk, now I understand why so many British nurses I worked with, said that Melbourne reminded them of home! :)

Lavender-Lass, A lovely picture! Always love horses, but I can't have one, don't have enough land. Would love to ride a horse to go shopping......have you done that? :-)

Here near Mt. Shasta in Northern California we get an average of around 50 inches of precipitation with part of that being 82 inches of snow on average. The last two years we haven't gotten the snow. The snowpack on our Mt. Shasta virtually disappeared. My year-round creek is flowing at good levels. This year looks like it'll be wetter. YAY! We do have a long dry summer with a few thunderstorms so I put out soaker hoses and irrigate in the summer.

Lavender lass, that's a gorgeous photo of your surroundings, but you have my sympathies when it comes to people not understanding what the true Northwest is. To most, it's that narrow strip of country that starts at the Pacific Ocean and extends to the Cascades-- in other words, Seattle, Portland, and their satellite cities and towns. But as we know, it's a whole lot more. I live in a semi arid desert, in the hills, but I can look out my windows and see tree covered mountains in easy view. My friend lives up the road at a higher elevation and is in the middle of a forest, on a low mountain. She has lots of snow, and acidic soil, and is in zone 5. This is just 20 miles away, in a totally different environment from what I live in. The Northwest is so much more than Seattle and Portland, though I love both cities, being born in Vancouver, Washington, and living briefly in Portland. Diane

Big Moon out back

Gorgeous pictures, everyone! I appreciate Diane and Lavender Lass helping everyone build a mental picture of the contrast between the Great Plains and the arid west. We ARE indeed Great Plains here in Nebraska, and traditionally we're thought of as a relatively dry climate, with the humidity very high if it reaches 40 or 45% in the summer. Just east of us across the Mississippi in Iowa or other Great Lakes states, they'd laugh at the idea of that being high humidity (I remember Seil listing hers at about 80%). There's a reason why the Great Plains are traditionally grasslands I guess - enough rain for grass but not enough for many native trees (except cottonwood) until you get out to the Rockies.

Even though we're on the dry side as far as humidity (and blackspot - yay) goes, our yearly average precipitation is something between 30-35 inches a year, more in this year. Of course some of that is snow, as is coming down all day today, but it takes a depressing amount of snow to make one inch of precipitation. Looking at everyone else's report, I count us fortunate to get as much rain as we do. Well, except this summer - in one memorable 36 hour period we had 13.5 inches of rain and all kinds of flooding and sewers backing up. Nothing like Buford's 100 inches, but it was a soggy spring and early summer.

It does highlight the fact that the "common wisdom" of how much rain a garden needs is highly situation specific. I'd always heard the rule of thumb that gardens need an inch of rain a week but that would average out to 52 inches a year, and almost no one logging in here except the southeast and selected folks on the US east coast seem to get that. I don't even bother to expect that in the growing season here, and only water an inch or so if we've been without rain for 2-3 weeks or it's just beastly hot. Even the relatively soggy Pacific Northwest or central England sites don't get that much rain for an inch a week, but plants grow well and there is the appearance of a lot of moisture. Maybe it's just the natural "misting" effect of the light rains that keep things so green there.
Just goes to show that roses (and other plants) can't read what they're "supposed" to do, and instead we give them the care that they "tell" us they need when we pay attention.

Cynthia

Soil: deep or shallow; sand, clay, stony. What time of year precipitation falls, with what intensity: deluge, drizzle, snowpack? How much sun; temperatures and their distribution--how hot is it in summer; is it cooler at night?--wind; atmospheric humidity; microclimate effects of surrounding plants, structures, physical features; effects on plants of disease, pests, cold damage. How the gardener gardens: watering schedule, if any; soil amending, mulching; plant selection.

We average about 40" of rain here. I did not water my roses or lawn this year (established plants) and everything survived. We have clay soil here, but the ground was cracked and dry by August. I still did not water the roses but they were mulched. Bloom production shut down which is to be expected. I watered only my annual vegetables and patio pots during hot & dry spells in July and August since they are not as drought tolerant as the shrubs and tall fescue.