My Japanese maple is still in bare branches. We’re in Toronto, mind you.
The forecast is 10 cm of snow tonight. Yay.
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How come when it’s 0 degrees in December you have the heat on, doors closed, and big thick wooly trousers and jumper? But in May, it’s 0 degrees, in a t-shirt, no socks, door wide open…
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Because tomorrow it will be back to 30º.
Do you promise?
I promise as a TV weather person would.
That’s good enough for me.
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That’s kinda like using the space heater to heat the bathroom to 65° in the winter to take a shower - and it still feels freezing when you get out. But in the summer 65° is shorts and t-shirt weather.
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Someone flipped the switch again 
It’s been so cold, rainy and gray through all of April and Yesterday and today it’s gorgeous, sunny and 60° 
Past two days woulda been really nice except for the wind. Both Saturday and Sunday were supposedly in the mid-60s but straightline 30mph north winds made it feel like 40F. It was too hot to be out in the sun while geared up for the wind. Weird. But I got quite a bit of gardening done…as much done as gardening ever is, LOL
(and this is not me thinking the comment will post by hitting return, LOL. Waaaay too much time on Discord the past few nights 
)
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Here in the Midwest, we’ve had one of the nicest sprigs I can remember for some time. All too frequently, spring is two weeks between running your furnace and having to turn the air conditioner on. It’s been a nice, long one this year.
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This was Tuesday evening, 11th May during a terrific thunderstorm. The rain was loud enough but then hail …
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It’s May 13, and our furnace is still running. This has been a long, cool spring.
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At 7pm tonight. It’s been like this and extremely humid for the past 4 days. One more day of this and they say a cold front is coming in … so we could have massive T-Storms tomorrow.
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I so want a massive thunderstorm. I LOVE thunderstorms!
I actually sat in a Fedex parking lot to watch the lightening over Boston yesterday on my way home. Thunder was just a far off rumble though (I was about 15 miles outside of Boston.)
We haven’t had any measurable rain in over 2 weeks. Garden is just about expired, except for 4 squash plants I try to get watered if I get home at a reasonable hour.
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We’ve had a fairly wet summer. Usually, by Independence Day, my yard is starting to look a bit dry. Right now, it looks just as good as it does in spring. I’m sure hot, dry weather is coming.
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In Utah, if we relied upon rain to keep things watered, we’d have nothing but sagebrush growing in our yards and tumbleweeds instead of flowers.
Here, it’s sprinkled once or twice during the last couple of months, but only a few drops that dry up as soon as they hit the ground. We get thunderstorms now and again, but there’s no rain — just lightning that starts wildfires. We generally don’t get much precipitation from the first of June until November or December. We might get a sudden afternoon downpour in August, but that’s about it.
We’re entering fire season now, where the primary changes in the weather involve heat and smoke. Most of our precipitation falls as snow during the winter. However, this last winter was dry. The reservoirs are drying up, and we’re running out of irrigation water. My hometown (where I’m headed later today) has instituted water rationing for the remainder of the summer. We’re allowed to water lawns once per week, and that’s only when there’s enough water to keep the irrigation system running. Utah is a semi-arid region, but the years-long drought is taking its toll. Even the Great Salt Lake is drying up and likely only about half the size it was 30 years ago.
The whole climate change thing is gradually shifting weather patterns in the Western US northward. Give it a few more years, and Utah will seem more like Arizona.
I read where it hit 121° F in British Columbia yesterday, which is totally crazy and unheard of. That’s Death Valley heat in Canada, which seems totally absurd. Most places in BC don’t get warm enough during the summer to even warrant air conditioning. I just checked, and there have been around 230 heat-related deaths there over the last few days. This isn’t good.
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This is usually the kind of weather reserved for places like Iraq or Afghanistan. Then I shouldn’t complain about Ontario.
Still, we are going to have in the next couple of days somewhat civilized weather, then a stretch of above 30º C (roughly 90º F) temperature. As I said, I really should not complain.
You don’t really want to know how stupid I think it is to have a lawn in the desert. Water for people and food if they grow anything there in that location is far more important. I actually think lawns are stupid period, but that’s beside the point.
If the garden won’t grow, it’ll get tilled under again. If it fails next year, I might give it up. Between the lack of rain, the insects, the diseases, the woodchucks, the rabbits and all the other rodents small enough to get through the wire fence, it is totally not worth it anymore. Not to mention the neighborhood association that gets on my case if they catch me with a trailer full of rotted cow manure (doesn’t smell) because it will put phosphates into the lake across the street, yet they can keep pouring fertilizers and weed killers on their lawns to keep them green right up to the waterline. Priorities you know.
We had brown outs last night, everyone with their ACs on. That has never happened in my lifetime. Can’t wait til they start rationing electricity.
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I totally agree. Most people here in Utah have ancestors who arrived from England and Denmark. They tried to recreate what they were used to back home and it’s become the norm.
People are finally getting used to the notion of xeriscaping, but it’s slow to catch on. A visit to any local nursery finds plants more suitable to New England than Utah. Half the plants sold at these places require soil amendments to even grow in our alkaline soil.
Here in Salt Lake, I’ve been gradually converting our yard over to native plants that only need to be watered, maybe, once per week. The local nurseries just don’t stock those plants, though, so they’re hard to find. The city also has a bizarre requirement that the strip between the sidewalk and the street needs to be kept mostly green.
It’s also expensive to do the conversion, and the plants require a whole different level of expertise to choose and maintain. If I were building a house from scratch, I might have a very small lawn just for fun, but I’d landscape everything else with rocks, yuccas, pinyon pines and the sort of thing that’s meant to grow here.
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