summer

Triple digits

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We have officially hit triple digit temperatures in my back yard. Its hot and dry, 101 and 33% humidity. Plants are just dying. Lawns are getting dry patches from not getting enough water. Potted plants are not happy, animals are not happy.

Trying to walk a dog in this weather is difficult. Even at 9pm its hot, often 89 degrees. And that’s just too hot to walk my dog. And of course, at 9pm its dark. You have to take a flashlight with you.

But we will see what happens thru the rest of summer. Will it get hotter? Very possibly it will. And if it does, it will be miserable.

And the heat goes on

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Well, I’m not sure if its good news or bad news. We will not hit the triple digits. That’s sort of good. But we will not be dipping out of the 90’s over the next 10 days. The nights are not what I would call terribly cool, but they do dip down just below 70 or stay in the low 70’s. At least one nice thing is no rain to speak of over here. But that’s not the say it can’t get humid. My dear wonderful dog has not been sleeping thru the night well, so I’m often up early (think 3am) to let him out. It is actually still pretty warm, high 70’s, but humid at that time of the night.

My plants are not happy. My lettuce is bolted as is any arugula left. And my peas are not happy.

In defiance of this heat, I have added a bit more watering heads to the drip water system. We’ll see if it helps the plants. But it looks like it will be a long hot summer, or spring, whichever this is.

Clouds 05/14/22

I will say we did have these interesting clouds yesterday. We don’t see these often.

Weather?

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Okay, this is a slightly different posting. I’m actually posting from an airport, DFW (Dallas/Fort Worth) to be precise. I’m on my way to CA for a few days, not exactly a fun trip, but a necessary trip.

But I’m posting this for a reason. For some reason my flight has been delayed, for 2 hours. This delay has meant I will miss my connecting flight. I’ve had to rebook the various legs to get me to CA. Why the delay? I have no clue. But I do know that when I got to the airport a number of flights were listed as delayed, some as long as 4 hours.

While on the short jaunt to DFW from Austin, I listened to others complaining. One guy mentioned his wife as on a flight due to leave at 8AM. He said it actually left at 1:45pm, over 5 hours late. Another guy mentioned that someone he knew was on a flight that had to be rerouted to Oklahoma City for refueling. It seemed that wherever they were going they couldn’t land and had to circle. They circled so long they had to reroute in order to refuel.

As I sat in a restaurant grabbing a bite to eat, the guy next to me said he had been on a flight. They had canceled the flight from Key West to wherever, possibly DFW. That was on Saturday, due to a storm coming in. They didn’t give him any sort of hotel nor food vouchers. He was able to beg a room from someone. It is now Monday and he still hasn’t finished his flight home. He’s hoping his 8pm flight will still occur and he will get home.

Is this all weather related? I don’t know. I do know that I wanted earlier flights in order to minimize the chance of storms here in the DFW area. And of course with the rain we had in Austin, I can watch storm clouds building over DFW. Summer storms can happen in this area, so it’s something I do think about.

Will I make it out as planned. I hope so. But what I do know is that the weather is affecting flights. Its affecting far more than just gardens.

Even though the other day my garden got 0.67 inches, the news said some areas got up to 2.5 inches of rain. And yes that did include some thunder and thunderstorms. That wasn’t just some little storm leaving sprinkles in its wake. So before you think weather is just about your garden, it can affect a lot more – flights, roads, flooding, landslides, and so much more.

Beware weather changes.

Not quite rainy week

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Texas weather is well, Texas weather. For the majority of this week they have forecast rain, at least somewhere. And then they change their mind. The good news is early this week, I think Sunday and Monday we did get rain. We got about one inch over the two days. But as of today, Thursday we haven’t had rain – at least not here at the house. But rain is in the forecast again.

Surprisingly, this weekend is Memorial Day weekend and we are not currently staring down at any major storms. This area often gets storms this weekend, and its nice that this weekend there are none in the forecast. That’s not to say we may not get rain, just not storms. We might get some rain Friday and Saturday, and a low possibility of morning rain on Monday.

Next week, the chance of rain goes up from Tuesday to Friday. Also our temperatures will only be in the mid 80’s (ONLY!). We’ve begin the slow climb to summer as our days will be in the mid 80’s and our night in the high 60’s (think 67-69). Yes this is cooler than summer in Texas. For this area of Texas summer temperatures are high 90’s to triple digits. So high 80’s is not our summer heat. Yup that’s Texas.

I’ll keep you posted on what we actually get.

Here comes the heat

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Yes, it wasn’t that long ago we were worried about our cold weather. This week, starting Wednesday April 7 we are due to hit 90 degrees. And we will spend 3 days at 90 degrees. According to the weather station I listen to, that is a week early on average for this area.

So welcome to the heat of Texas.

In anticipation of the summer temperatures here, I just had a pergola/deck cover installed over my outside deck. It looks like it showed up just in time. They are still working on the pergola, they delivered the wood and stained in on Thursday last week. They didn’t work Friday as it was Good Friday. But today they put it up, with just a bit of work to still do.

I am having a product called Polygal put on. We’ll see how I like it. I’m not quite sure how to describe it since I haven’t yet seen it. I’ll let you know what it is, and what I think of it once it gets installed.

Cold front

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The weather in Austin has actually be rather nice the past few days/weeks. I took a long weekend trip earlier this month and came back to 90 degree weather. So Austin has been warm to nice. Nice being mid to high 80’s. But today we have had a cold front come in.

I was out walking the boys (my dogs) a couple of hours ago, just before noon. It was lovely, though a bit overcast. It was warm, a little bit humid, in the mid 70’s, my watch said 76. While walking the boys there was a light breeze. But during this walk I encountered a cool breeze. In a matter of minutes that cool breeze became a cold breeze. Still a breeze, no great strength to it. But the temperature began to drop. I had left wearing jeans, a tee shirt, with a denim shirt (no jacket), and the temperature began enough of a drop for me to begin to get chilled.

Now, just a couple of hours later, the temperature has fallen to 50 degrees per my watch. That’s a 20+ degrees drop in a matter of a couple of hours.

We even had a short shower outside. Not much, it registered as less than 1/2″ of rain. But needless to say, its a cold rain, on now a cold day.

The forecast – rain and mid 40’s for tonight.

As for plants, well I plan to cover the tomatoes or at least bring them in so they are under the patio. Those plants I’m worried about will probably be placed in the same area. Those I’m not worried about, the lettuce, flowers, mint, etc. those can stay outside. Since we don’t expect to get even close to freezing I’m not going to be concerned about them. Yes if it gets cold enough I may lose a few plants. But here in this area first front is due in less than a month, so those plants should be winding down anyways.

Maybe it really is autumn, going into winter here in Austin.

Rain

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Well, we didn’t cool down as much as they said, but we have cooled down and gotten rain. We are in the mid 70’s, that’s nice. And since last night we’ve had 1-3/4 inches of rain here at the house. And its been a pretty steady slow rain. Where we do currently have flash flood warnings for Travis County, it has been raining since last night. So even though I’m sure the ground has been absorbing a lot of the water, its still a lot of rain and its continuing. I’m sure some areas have gotten more than others. In our last rain last week, some areas got an inch, maybe 2, yet some areas got 7″ of rain. So some areas are fairly saturated. Those are probably more in danger of flooding. But at least we are getting some rain. And we need that.

The shade cloth I had recently put up has been pulled back so the plants can get what ever sun shines. I haven’t taken it down, and I’m not going to yet. I don’t know if we’ll have nice weather than suddenly have a hot spell or what. This is central Texas after all, and you never know what you’ll get for weather.

I was watching weather on tv this morning and it was interesting that some spots had gone from 100+ temperatures to snow in 2-3 days. That’s a rather significant weather change. But that’s what the weather has been like. Weather.com says some places have dropped 60 degrees in 24 hours. Denver for example was 93 on Monday. Today its 34 degrees at 9AM. How that for a change?

here’s how accuweather saw the change in Denver weather

We got rain!

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Well its been rain, sun, and rain, and rain and run.

One day we got half an inch in a downpour. Then the next day we got another half an inch. Then a full inch of rain. Today we hit a lovely 88, I even took the dogs out for a walk. It was lovely. The sun has been out, its been a little bit humid, but not as oppressive as we’ve known.

Its just about 4:30 and it is pouring outside. Once it stops raining I’ll go see how much rain we got. It should be just a short shower, it was sunny and its still rather bright right now, even though its raining.

To give you an idea of how much rain we’ve had, some areas over 6″ of rain (couldn’t find data, sorry). That’s what they said on the news.

AND our forecast includes an early cold front.

I’m not sure how often the area of Texas gets a cold front, down to the 60’s in September. It will be interesting to see what we actually get.

But the garden should enjoy this cooler weather. I’ve took the time and put in the additional seed – spinach and lettuce. But the other seeds are doing fine.

Sigh of relief.

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Hurricane Marco was a bust. It didn’t do anything here. And Laura, which is currently still ongoing, make landfall at a category 4, and 12+ hours later is still a category 1. But it did not even give Austin any rain.

We are lucky, the storm did not make landfall in Texas, it landed in Louisiana, so we did not get that much damage. But make no mistake, Louisiana has taken a hard hit. Laura is a powerful storm, but at this point it is still a bit early to know the entire extent of the damage.

The storm is heading its way up to Arkansas, then over to the Memphis area, across Kentucky, then out to the coast, and up the coast line. How this storm is managing this I do not know.

As for Austin, we are back to hot. The weather forecast includes high 90’s to low 100’s again. How long this heat wave will last is definitely up for debate. Next week is the start of September and the highs are still in the 90’s. At this point I’m not sure what normal temperatures would be. But we are just plain hot.

Shade cloth

In honor of all this heat, I decided to attempt using a shade cloth over part of the garden. Since the garden is so close to the back fence, the shade cloth is attached to the fence using bungee cords. The shade cloth has grommets around the edges, so I have grommets impaled onto the 6 foot tall bamboo sticks to help keep it over the garden. Not the most elegant solution, but one that works for the time being. Since I’m not sure how long I will keep the shade cloth up, and I need an easy way to take it down if needed, this works. I consider this part of the learning process of a garden.

Hopefully this works and my fall seeds will sprout and be happy.

Summer?

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Somehow they seem to think we are in summer. Well, the calendar says we are, but the weather is still wonky. We’ve had some days with storms, yet warm weather.

This past week, we had high 80’s and some 90’s yet have gotten over an inch of rain. We’ve also had some issues this week with a dust storm from the Sahara that made its way to Texas. Its left us with a haze in the sky. Its hazy enough to even notice it looking down the street. Its possible to notice the dusty haze on even such a short distance. Yet we had some rain, probably 1/4 inch, today, and about a inch earlier in the week.

As for the garden, its very different from my last yard. My two beds are growing some things well. The raised beds with squash, cucumbers, and melons are growing well. Yet the peppers in the same beds are not. I’m trying to chalk it up to old seed. I’m not sure that’s true, but at least it sounds good. I say I’m not sure its true as some new seed didn’t sprout even.

But I am having some success. I’ve begun harvesting some zucchini and cucumbers. I have learning some interesting things. Next to the deck is a small protected area. This area does get some shade. What’s interesting is that a pot with zucchini in this area is doing poorly, whereas the same seed in the raised bed is already producing. I’ve moved that potted zucchini out by the raised bed. We’ll see if that helps. I do know that the peas are growing well in this protected area. So it may be this is a good spot for lettuce and some plants that need less heat.

I have had some additional problems to deal with. I recently came down with shingles. In my case it has shown up on my face, scalp, and neck. This means it’s rather hard for me to go out into the sun. Luckily I was put on medication to help, and within two weeks now have scabs, so I’m no longer contagious. But I will say scabs on the scalp are not comfortable. Having shingles on the scalp have made washing my hair, brushing my hair, and wearing my glasses extremely uncomfortable. The pain and fatigue of shingles is a very real problem. So having shingles has made it harder to work in my garden.

But I am still plugging along. I’m even starting to think about next years needs. I’m thinking that my front yard may needs some irises, maybe a peony, maybe something else. I’d like to get some color out in the front, but of course I do have problems with deer out front so that has to be taken into consideration. We’ll see.