A month ago a bunch of us neighbours were sitting around a barbeque and talking about the the rain we'd had so far this summer. We haven't been keeping track but some had and reported that it was at the seventeen inches mark as of July 4th, well past the average for this time of the year. Well, here we are a month later - and at least ten more inches - with storm warnings out again for this afternoon and evening. There were two days last week that didn't have these warnings, it felt kind of weird.
These aren't big low pressure systems coming and raining gently down on our fields. These are pressure cooker storms that suck the moisture up from our saturated fields, brew it up into a boiling pot of energy, and slams it back down at the end of the day with wind and hail and rain that comes in sideways. It gives us a fairly comfortable night temperature, but in the morning it starts all over again. There is nothing unusual about this as a typical prairie summer storm, what is not typical is to have them every night - and all the way from Edmonton to Winnipeg. I don't know how many times there have been golf ball to soft ball sized hail reported this summer. That's normally a rarity, not a weekly occurrence. Carlyle is a town 40 miles west of here and that's where the hail gods made their mark last night. Here's hoping that they're done with this area now. I imagine that the insurance companies are starting to sweat about the constant claims rolling in too. It's been quite the summer - and it's only half over so far.
My yard work has sure suffered. First of all, the whole place was under water for almost two weeks. My garden is an almost complete write off. No potatoes, no peas or beans. The spinach didn't make it, the corn is yellowed and slow in developing. This swiss chard did okay and the beets are coming, as are the carrots. I found the cucumbers in that weedy mess, but I don't know if either they, or the tomatoes will ever bear fruit
