Seeds are up...

So, I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that the dry season is upon us... but, for the first time in months, this evening was quite pleasant. Hot and not exactly dry... but not muggy. We had a nice shower around four that cooled things off, and the sun was so low that it could no longer warm things back up. When I did my after-work walk through the garden, it was wholly pleasant.

I noticed that most of my seeds were up--broccoli, collards, arugula, and chard.

Brrr....

It's pouring out there right now -- my guess is we've had at least an inch of rain, with much more expected. It's just too wet to even check the rain gauge. I did my spring fertilizing today, so this rain is particularly welcome.

We almost never get this weather in the middle of March. I'm planning on doing some major landscaping projects tomorrow, so for me this is perfect. It's been, overall, a fairly cool winter here -- witness the dogwoods and Prunus blooms, which are a lot more florid than in recent memory. I'll have to take some pictures...

Update: They've dropped the forecast to thirty-five degrees. Brrrr. Keep in mind that it was eighty-three yesterday!

Holy Cow Update: I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of an intense rainstorm -- drops so huge that I thought initially someone was walking up the old wooden staircase to our bedroom. This morning the gauge read three-and-a-half inches! On top of the half-inch earlier this week and the inch last week. March is usually a pretty dry month, averaging just under four inches of rain in a normal year.

The dry season is upon us...

Noel's finally blown out of here, though even this afternoon, when I made a run by Flagler Pier, the winds were fierce and the waves topped fifteen feet at times. Baby sea turtles everywhere on the beach, blown in with the Sargasso seaweed mats.

On my way to Flagler, I stopped by the Edible Nursery in Holly Hill. Nice selection of temperate/tropical trees, including avocados, mangoes, Barbados Cherries, loquat, kumquat, loads of citrus, guava, persimmon, and figs.

I got a beautiful seven-gallon Barbados Cherry and a five-gallon Fuyu non-astringent persimmon.

Noel....

TS Noel is sitting off the coast, sending bands of squally rain and sometimes stiff winds across the eastern half of the peninsula. It's been raining here since Friday -- not huge accumulations (around one and a half inches so far). Intermittent, light and brief. The dewpoint and humidity are in the upper 60s, which is very high for this time of the year. Really awful weather, not just for us bipeds but for the garden, too. I need to get out and trim back some roses, before the fertilizer I applied last week kicks in. Plus, the weeds are popping up everywhere. I just cannot bring myself to work in a very wet and windy garden.

Anyway, this weekend, I did manage to transplant the geraniums and herbs that I started as seeds a few weeks ago. I also planted more radish, more chard, some chervil and 'Red Sails' leaf lettuce. The kids' chard ('Bright Lights') is getting chewed up by (I think) flea beetles, though the 'Sea Foam' chard and lettuces that are nearby are untouched.

Cukes continue to produce, though the fruit is often infested with the damn pickleworm. Tomatoes are maybe just now setting fruit. The fig tree has lost its leaves. The citrus is ripening.

Weekend bustling 'bout the garden...

I came home on Friday night to find (somewhat mysteriously) a box of strawberry plants on my doorstep -- three-hundred of them to be exact. I had contacted Ruby Mountain Nursery last week with an inquiry about their berries. It sounds like a great idea -- grow the berries at high altitude, far away from other strawberry plants (thus reducing the chances for viruses). Use minimal fungicides and almost no herbicides. Since it's so cold in La Jara, the plants have already had a good amount of winter chilling and flower bud development; they should produce earlier and grow more vigorously than plants grown in milder areas. Plus, he had commercial varieties that are hard for a home gardener to get. (I got Chandler (an old favorite), Strawberry Festival, and Winter Dawn.)

Anyway, I had contacted the grower last week, expressing interest and asking for ordering instructions. Next thing I know, the box is on by doorstep... (Two-hundred fifty of the plants went to Nize, my local sustainable grower. Fifty should be enough for my family.)

(For the Yankees reading this blog, in FLA we grow strawberries as annuals.)

I still don't know how I'm supposed to pay for the plants, but I guess the guy will send me an invoice. No complaints here, the plants were very nice, and I'm delighted to have plants this early in the season.

Anyway, lucky thing the weather on the coast was too bad for me to fish for reds. Instead, I spent a VERY HOT and humid day yesterday quickly preparing my beds (lots of mushroom compost, a two-inch layer of live-oak leaves, lots of cottonseed meal). I'll need to run the microsprinklers in the bed a bunch this week, with the hot weather we're predicted to have. I'm a bit worried about the plants, but they looked fine this morning. (Though by late afternoon they were again very wilty...)

I took the time, while I was hot and very sweaty, to go ahead and clean out my perennial bed. I pulled a diseased rosebush, ripped out a bunch of overgrown Alternanthera and weeded the backs of the beds. We had another inch of rain on Friday and Saturday. It's crazy how quickly weeds and mushrooms can grow here when the sun's a bit less intense and the ground's sodden.

Some relief is around the corner: This coming weekend the National Weather Service is predicting our first big "back-door front" pushing down from the Great Lakes. That should drop the temperature down to the low-eighties during the day and upper fifties at night... There will be much rejoicing in this household.

Tonight, while cooking my wife her birthday supper, I managed to plant geraniums ('Summer Showers' ivy mix and 'Ringo Deep Scarlet', both from Swallowtail), cilantro ('Delphino'), dill ('Dukat'), parsley ('Rezzemolo Gigante d'Italia'), cutting celery, and some Broccoli di Rapa.

More rain, now a cool morning...

The winds have started blowing out of the north-east. That brought a bunch of rain off the Atlantic yesterday, dousing us with a good one-and-a-half inches of rain. I don't know if that made up for a pretty dry August and a very dry spring, but I imagine the lakes and rivers are all back more or less to normal. This morning in the garden it was a cool sixty-nine degrees and very pleasant, except the blasted mosquitoes, which were hungry but torpid.

Froggy weather

A persistent and slow-moving low pressure area off the Southeast Florida coast has soaked my part of Volusia county. Forecasts predicated about an inch of rain... my rain gauge reads a mite bit over four inches. The ground is just plain spongy, and the retention ponds are almost filled.

We haven't had a rain like this one in two years. It's welcome to stay around as long as it likes.

really really amazing weather

All winter I complained about how screwy the weather was (recall the tornadoes that affected the area twice this winter). Well, today's weather was simply unreal: High 70s, with a dewpoint in the 40s:Another backdoor front passed through last night (I think), pulling down nice air. This kind of weather typifies our February and March weather. By this time of the year, we're usually sweating it out in the upper 80s with dewpoints of 74. Not quite unbearable, but not comfortable, either. We hardly used the AC since, well, December. It's dry and the sun is hot and the day is long. With an early morning, daily watering, my plants are going wild.

Rain!

It rained last night and today, a total of about two inches, perhaps a bit more. This evening we enjoyed the cool, drier air (73 degrees and 61 degrees for the dew point -- which translates into very comfy conditions). This "backdoor front" (backdoor because it comes from the north) is rare this time of the year. Our May winds are usually from the south-east, not the north-east:

Last night's rainfall was more characteristic of a winter storm than a summer rain, which is usually caused by instability brought on by the sea breeze interacting with the much hotter air over the peninsula. We're in the midst here in Florida of an epic drought and hellfire, so the rain is welcome, whatever its provenance.

It was actually too cool to sit on the patio with drinks. That never happens mid-May. My foxgloves and poppies are living large.

Useful weather data... Long Range Temperature and Precipitation Forecasts

From the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service. The charts show the probabilty for two scenarios:

• hotter than normal/and cooler than normal; and
  
• more precipitation than normal/less precipitation than normal.
  

The intensity of cooler indicates the probability of exceeding or falling short of the norm, while the white areas (EC) indicate equal chance of exceeding or falling short of then norm. (It does not indicate, it should be noted, that weather will be "normal," just that no preponderance of evidence indicates a warmer/cooler or wetter/drier -- a subtle but important distinction.)

Thus, dark brown means it is very likely that temperatures will exceed the norm while dark blue would indicate that it was very likely for temperatures to be below normal. Notice that degree or intensity of deviation from the norm is not indicated, only probability.

Here's the prognosis for April, 2007 made mid-March:

So, evidence would indicate that we have a slightly better than average chance of a warmer (but how much warmer?) spring and early summer and a roughly equal chance of a wetter or drier period over the next three months.

For our rainy season -- July, August and September -- it looks likely we're significantly more likely to have a wetter and warmer period than historical averages:

The accuracy of these instruments isn't terribly high, but they I suppose some indication is better than no indication.

Record low rainfall in Central Florida

DeLand saw its lowest summer rainfall total ever...

2006 one of the driest years on record...

2006 will go down as one of the driest years on record across east-central Florida. The dry conditions can largely be attributed to the strong influence of enso (el nino-southern oscillation) on Florida weather. Last winter and Spring were dominated by La Nina... which typically results in drier than normal conditions across the state. Rainfall deficits continued during the Spring and early Summer... resulting in an increase in devastating wildfires across the area. El Nino conditions developed during the Summer which had a significant impact on tropical storm and hurricane development in the Atlantic Basin. The general lack of tropical activity across the region contributed to additional rainfall deficits during the late Summer and through the fall... when significant rainfall is often quite common across the area. El Nino
conditions are expected to continue through early 2007... which will likely result in above normal rainfall through the remainder of the dry season.

Below is a list of some notable rainfall totals from around the
forecast area:

Location 2006 rainfall total rank record low rainfall/year
Deland 37.09 inches 1 39.28/1974 (previous)
Stuart 37.77 inches 1 38.02/1981 (previous)
Daytona Beach 31.39 inches 2 31.36/1956
Lisbon 32.66 inches 2 29.26/2000
Vero Beach 33.56 inches 2 32.70/1961
Orlando area 36.35 inches 3 30.38/2000
ft Pierce wp 33.84 inches 3 30.07/1917
Sanford wp 37.25 inches 5 32.83/2000
Sanford Arpt 41.27 inches 6 33.16/1967
Melbourne 39.95 inches 7 31.97/1981