Rain

Should we take up a pool and guess when it will rain next? Just kidding.

A dry lake would work better down here, as we do not have enough water for a pool now.

Ernie

There were clouds today . . . really clouds. I did a rain dance, maybe tomorrow.
Between the bug stressed pines and the thirsty oaks, I fear the trees are going to start dropping.
My prickly pears are all wrinkley and the wildlife are eating all my succulents. This is bad. I feel like I should be watering the pasture so the deer will have some food but I don't dare waste the water, we are on a well.

I am also on a well, very stressful to not know if you will have enough water to make it through the summer.

From one of my peeps on another forum


Long-term droughts have ocurred in the past in California, prior to the instrumental record:

Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years -- compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.

Stine, who has spent decades studying tree stumps in Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the Walker River and other parts of the Sierra Nevada, said that the past century has been among the wettest of the last 7,000 years.

Already, the 2013-14 rainfall season is shaping up to be the driest in 434 years, based on tree ring data, according to Lynn Ingram, a paleoclimatologist at UC Berkeley.

California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say - San Jose Mercury News

Maybe I should have kept that house in New Mexico.

200 years?

Kelli - that's sooo depressing.

It rained for 1 minute today . . . it started a spontaneous rain dance in both myself and my daughter. The dance obviously didn't help.

In this day and age, one minute of rain is a lot.

A 200 year drought cannot possibly mean 200 years without rain. All the vegetation as we know it would die. That has got to be 200 years of below average rain like 2011/2012 and 2012/2013. We still had wildflowers those years but 2014 is brutal. Almost nothing is coming up.


Toyon is the wild is drying up. So is the scrub oak in places.

A few signs of life, though.

Wild cucumber gets its energy from a huge tuberous root.

It must be magic that is getting this golden currant to sprout. ;-)

Of course ragweed sprouts, just out of sheer cussedness.

Keep doing those rain dances!!

We got a whopping 6 minutes of rain on Sunday afternoon. 10 minutes later you'd never have known it, though.
I pruned all my roses the week before Xmas and they've already leafed out...8 weeks early.
What happened to "winter" here ?

Here's a photo of our "bunny" friend who has discovered he likes sunflower seeds and so he hangs around under the birdfeeder. Smart rabbit, there isn't much else to eat out here.
JasperDale - I'm already putting in seeds, the ones I put in a week ago are going strong. I'm thinking about starting some tomatoes and melons in the greenhouse now. But what's really strange is I still have a tomato from last year that is producing in there! Winter came and went so fast I guess it didn't notice.

Saw a few rugged wildflowers on Friday.

The rain we got a few weeks ago is causing some grass to come up in this burn area.

We got a total of 3 inches of rain from the last storm, giving us a total for the year of about 4.5".

But that 3 inches came at exactly the right time, and everything is just bursting with new growth now.. The steep hillsides did not absorb all of it, so they are not as green as normal, but like in Canoga Park, they do show some green.

El Nino is forecast for next year, so we will probably have too much rain then.

Ernie

I hope we do get a mild El Nino but I also hope we can get our leaky window fixed before then. We can't tell where it is leaking from. DH is putting some kind of gunk on it right now but who knows when it will rain enough so see if he did the right thing. I'm guessing it won't be until November or December.

I couldn't believe someone was posting on the "rain" thread. Looks like we've seen what we're getting this year. We had a leak too, what do you expect, a dome and all. The outside of the dome is cement board, supposedly non permeable. We still have trouble with leaks, every seam is a potential leak point, not to mention the windows being slanted upwards!