Thanks for clarifying about your microclimate Frank. :-) We ended up with a pretty big thunder bumper here early this morning starting around 3:30 - 4am and going on and off until now (as I watch the sun now emerging, soon to begin to boil the air until it is a soupy mess). I was surprised as it wasn't really forecast that I recall (although they have had scattered showers in the forecasts for weeks now here).

It's pouring here too. DH moved one of the feeders a few feet to its winter site, partially protected by the carport overhang should they choose to dine out of the rain. But so far I've only seem them on the smaller feeder exposed to the weather :) And going into a dogwood that is still fully leafed out when finished instead of the usual places at the tips of a viburnum.

Y'all, I was so excited that it was going to rain....and it did rain, but only 2/10s of an inch! We had so much thunder and such dark skies, but this storm was mostly "all blow, and no go" for us, as my dad used to say. Bessie, I figured if we were getting too dry here, y'all were probably getting too dry over there too. What a change from a month ago! G. M., It is strange how y'all always get so much more rain than we do, and we're only 1 county away from one another! Several days while you were gone to the lake, we had little afternoon showers pop up in Marietta and they had a pretty good rain, but we were left out/passed over out here in the county. I can remember some cool August weather too quite a ways back. Almost every August since we moved here, though, the weather has been brutal during the first 2 weeks of the month. Our first year here, my brother and sister-in-law and their 2 kids came (from Pennsylvania) to visit and Ardmore was the hottest place in the country for several of the August days that they were here....with temps in the 108 to 113 range. They have been back to visit since then.....but only during the winter months. :) It is only 88 degrees here right now.....on this date last year, we had a high temp of 101. I'll take 88 over 101 any day. I was watching the news from Minneapolis-St. Paul earlier. Last night, watching it in real time, took me back to 2002 and Webbers Falls. I really feel for the people in Minnesota--what a shock to have a major bridge collapse! Dawn

I've been awaiting the El Nino update that will advise us that an El Nino is developing and we'll have a really rainy fall and winter, but that El Nino is taking its own sweet time. If something happens, and we stay neutral or have only a very weak El Nino, I don't know that we'll see good rainfall recovery. Carol, It is hard to imagine you or Dorothy or others in your area will get close to average annual rainfall for 2012 unless you're flooded all fall, and no one wants that. Still, we can hope y'all will get as much as possible. When our rainfall was stuck at 12" in August 2011, I began to wonder if we'd even hit 20" for the year, which would have been about an inch over 50% of our average annual rainfall, but I felt like 20" was something realistic to hope for. We had a wet fall last year and ended up with 23", for 2011 but that still was 15" below average so we started 2012 too dry as it was. Amazingly, as dry as last year was here, it wasn't even our worst year since we moved here. Our worst year was 2003, when we had less than 19" of rain. I remember that year well. I made the mistake in spring of continuing to think that rain surely would fall "any day now", and it didn't. I wasn't watering as much in early spring as I should have been and my plants stalled. I learned from that lesson, and no longer wait for the expected spring rains to fall. I just irrigate if they aren't falling. We go through lots of rain gauges too. I try to remember to bring them in before they freeze and break, but don't always succeed. One of these days I am going to buy a really good one. We have had the best luck with putting one on a wooden post, so Tim cannot run over it with the lawn mower or shatter it with the weed eater, a common fate of previous rain gauges. I have kept peppers alive in pots all winter just by dragging them into the garage on a few cold nights. They produced all winter, but the fruit that set in December and January was very slow to grow and ripen. I think that with pots in the greenhouse, the fruit will grow and ripen faster. I intend to find out this winter, but I am still undecided about whether to heat the greenhouse on cold nights or just carry the pot of peppers to the well-insulated garage. I have big plans for a fall and winter garden, but they are stalled while this heat wave drags on. After the cooldown hits, I am going to sow seeds of all kinds of kale, collards, lettuce, Swiss chard,radishes, spinach, cool-season herbs, beets, etc. I'll put the floating row cover over the hoops over those beds when really cold weather threatens. I also have two kinds of cabbage and one kind of broccoli growing in paper cups and ready to go in the ground as soon as the heat breaks. I was hoping I'd get them in the ground this week, but here we are still waiting for cooler weather....I have them where they get morning sun and afternoon shade right now and they still are not very happy. You'll love having a greenhouse in the winter. I cannot believe how much it simplified seed-starting this past spring. I sure didn't miss carrying all those flats of plants in and out when cold nights threatened, especially since my lighted plant shelves are upstairs in the weight room. I cannot even begin to guess how many trips I've made up and down those stairs with flats of plants in all the years since we moved here. Larry, My rain gauge never matches the rainfall readings from town, from the NWS Co-operative weather observer in our county, or from our Mesonet station. I have noticed, though, that in most years even though our daily totals don't match, we often end up with about the same amount of total rainfall for the year. There are some exceptions. On at least three occasions I can remember, our part of the county got incredibly heavy rainfall that missed other parts of the county. On one of those occasions we got 9.25", though some other parts of our county got about 6", and on another one, we got almost 9" while other parts of the county got between 2" to nothing. We also got 12.89" once when some other parts of the county farther from the river only got half that, or even less. This year, some parts of western Love County got rain several times in the summer when we didn't, but then we got 3" last week and they didn't get nearly that much, so it seems to average out pretty evenly over time. Friends who live a mile south of us often don't get as much rain as we get and friends less than a mile north usually do. I think we are in a pretty good part of our specific county because overall we do get some good rainfall occasionally even in the worst years. Dawn