We are having a really, really weird June here in Utah.
Rain every other day. Daytime temperatures are consistently between 70-85 degrees. Usually we get our last rain at around the last frost date, April 15. Then there is pretty much no rain (other than a few tiny sprinkles) until around the first frost on October 15, except for one week of rain in mid-August. The daytime temperatures tend to stay between 90-100 degrees from mid-May until mid-October.
I feel like I’m living in somebody else’s ecosystem, maybe Oregon or something.
On the one hand, this is amazing weather. On the other hand, what’s going on?!
I was expecting potatoes, oca, and fava beans to maybe be marginal here because they don’t like heat. Instead, they’re all thriving. Even peas are thriving. In June. And I have brassicas I started from seed that seem downright ecstatic. Meanwhile, my squashes are tiny and looking stunted and miserable. Usually I’d have a bunch of huge vigorous zucchini plants by now.
I’m definitely seeing the wisdom of growing as much diversity as possible, including things that normally suffer and barely hold on in your climate. You can never predict when you’ll get a year of weather that’s totally abnormal.
The weather I am getting in south MS is normal for this time of year. We get about 65 inches a year. I got blocked from finishing my okra beds last weekend. Very frustrating.
The weather was really different and weird in parts of March and April, but I think we are now back to normal.
Wierd here. We usually have two seasons. Winter and Summer.
The averages this spring were well below normal so we had normal spring weather this year. That ended this week and we should be 100 by end of the week.
It’s normal however to every once in a while to get this spring weather on the El Niño and La Niña cycle. We had entered a shoulder “in between period” early in the year. Now we are steaming full ahead with gusto into a full blown El Niño pattern. So more heat and wet for us in the northern hemisphere while in the southern hemisphere opposite of us they will go into below averages and dryer weather patterns until it all flips and reverses and we all trade places again with the folks on the opposite side of the planet.
Cool and wet spring in France. Happy for dairy farmers. Lots of grass and hay to harvest. Last three weeks it’s started to warm up and it got dry , i was preparing for another way too dry summer, but rains have arrived.
So we’re off to a great start.
Everywhere in Western Europe it has been cold and wet this spring.
It was a very dry spring and winter here in Kansas. The spring rains are usually over by May, but they just started. It’s usually into the high nineties by now, but we’ve been getting warm days and cool nights.
This has definitely been a weird spring! Where I’m at in Kansas has occasional droughts, but spring is usually pretty good about seasonal rains around the time I’m really getting my spring/summer garden going. Nope, not this year. I usually time my tomato transplanting around the time my volunteer cherry tomatoes come up, which is pretty consistent… this year, they were several weeks late! On the other hand, the delayed heat @Lauren mentioned means my late start on planting this year hasn’t been as big of a deal. So far everything is thriving.
In Wyoming we have gotten a lot more rain this Spring than normal. We normally go from Winter to Summer. It’s been great all this rain that we are getting . But definitely, not normal.
Yes, last summer was really dry. Atleast 3 before also had extended dry periods with occasional deluge, but last year was really crazy. After normal spring we got 30mm per month untill septemper instead of average 70mm. This year has started even worse. Spring is normally drier period for us in terms of precipitation and snowmelt helps to keep ground wet. This year we got half of normal rainfall in april and may (about 20mm per month) and after last summer snowmelt really wasn’t enough to keep soil moist. There was moisture, but not really enough for plants to establish so I*ve been watering with pump. It seems like it isn’t getting any easier with heatwave (highs of 25-30C/77-86F) atleast for a week and no rain in forecast. This month it has rained total of 4mm . I can deal with pump, but lots of people do it manually and this kinda of dryness it’s not really possible to compensate missing rainfall. Other thing that makes thing worse is that usually heatwaves have been shorter and they have ended with thunderstorms. It’s even a saying in finnish language. Not anymore. It’s like week maybe two week of heatwave and little rumbling in the skies (maybe couple mm of rainfall if lucky) with couple days cooler and then another heatwave. Heat does help me to bridge the cap with some crops that would not make it in coolest summers so it’s kinda double edged sword. Hopefully could get more normalish summers and not like hot, hot, cold, cold etc because it really makes it hard to adabt to certain climate if there is none.
Weird is just the way it is now. No reason to expect anything other than it will keep getting weirder. I know it isn’t what people what to hear but I’m afraid we are not going to breed, select or landrace our way through this because it’s happening too fast, and it isn’t going to stop.
New Hampshire has been a strange winter/spring. We had 80s in February, then a really late 25F cold snap in May - shocked a lot of the leaves on some oaks, apples, and other fruit trees and finished off my poor cherry tomatoes. Then it got up into the 80s and 90s… now it’s been two weeks of 60s-70s with rain.
Got sunny for a few hours on Sunday - long enough to finally get the rest of our soil blocks in the ground. They’re all getting watered in with another week of rain ahead of us. I’m not sure if this is normal for here as it’s our first year here, but it’s certainly a rollercoaster. I’m loving this cooler, rainy weather though. It’s definitely my wheelhouse. It also happens to be the mosquitoes favorite unfortunately…
Weird in upstate NY as well: early heat wave followed by late hard freeze followed by weeks of drought during what is usually our rainiest season. Lost all the tree fruit, though the berry bushes are doing OK. Worst of all, a rabbit invaded the vegetable garden (presumably because that was the only area being watered) and ate nearly all the peas, lima beans, peppers, and eggplant. We bought some pepper and eggplant seedlings to replace what we had grown, but it was too late to plant new peas and limas.
Here in Poland, part of the country is in extreme drought, part under heavy rains. All of that on top of the night frost in the first week of June. People who planted their tomatoes on May 15th as always, have lost them all.
Most days are 60-79°F cloudy/part cloudy with misting in early morning/nights. June often would be in the 80’s and sunny.
I have got a late start since I had to prepare a new garden (larger and less shady.) So many plants are just getting their true leaves. I am about 30 miles from the coast so “June Gloom” doesn’t usually apply here. I like the weather this month.
It is definitely weird weather here! We’ve almost got an average year’s worth of precipitation so far; everything is soaking wet. And the weather has been cool and cloudy—the result is that all my warm-weather plants are struggling. What makes this even more amazing is that February and April were unusually warm and dry. We still haven’t seen temperatures as warm as we saw in April. So first cool-season spring plantings bolted or dried out, and now the summer plantings are flooding.
We’ve also got two hailstorms—but that is normal here!
The weather in central Alberta has been weird. The hottest May on record dried up whatever moisture we had from the melted snow. Last frost is at the end of May so my garden wasn’t able to take advantage of the extra heat. The heat has continued into June with no rainfall yet. It’s so dry that the dandelions in my yard are starting to shrivel up.
The garden at my house is doing ok since I can water it. The other two gardens are a half hour drive and a two hour drive. I have made it out to the closer of the two and watered that a few times so it’s struggling but surviving. I finally made it out to the other one last weekend and had to reseed half of it and watered what was still surviving.
It looks like we should receive at least 1/2" of rain over the next two days with potential for up to 1 1/2". The gardens away from my house were intended to be mostly self sufficient apart from occasional weeding so they need as much rain as we can get. June is usually our wettest month of the year and often quite cool as well. July and August are usually much drier.
We need the early rains for the seeds to germinate and get established before the summer heat dries everything out.
Here in the UK weird is normal now. That’s why in my opinion diverse genetics are essential.
I was living on the road in the last millennium and even then all around Asia the climate was rapidly changing, really messing with farmers and even with water supplies for drinking. Like queues to get water to take home for drinking and washing, in places that had up to then had very reliable glacial water supplies.
Now it’s just an acceleration of that. The sad thing is that the corporations and governments have known about this my whole life. But have always been focused on short term financial and power benefits, whist they destroy the biosphere in the process. It has always concerned me deeply. Now I fully expect global food crisis to hit us, I’d guess within the next 3~10 years. I just hope that working on breeding genetically diverse local crops can help some ordinary folk deal with the impending disaster.
Another vite for odd weather here in 6b Eastern PA: We had no rain from the end of April until almost the second week of June. Hot and dry and really windy days, the lawns all looked like in August with brown and tan grass. A frost 2 days past the later frost date in May.
Since last week it has finally started raining, and we have had some soaking tains every few days.
My garden is soing okay bwcause we diligently watered everyday, by hand as the township only provides a watertower and you have to schlepp the water to your lot. But the plants really took off after it started raining, my one patch of corn is just about 3 feet tall!
The bunnies also have done some damage throughout even though we had a fence. There was just nothing else watered so it must have been tastier to eat my bean seedlings and sunflowers
I’ve seen a suggestion that the emergence of complex, grain dependent civilisation in multiple locations around the globe within a narrow time period, after tens of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, was due to the climate settling into a period of relative stability. Annual grain growing requires moisture at the time of planting and reliable dry weather during harvest. Egypt is the perfect example of this pattern (before the Nile was dammed).
Australia has never had a reliable climate, so even though a few parts of it seem fertile enough on average, grain growing never emerged here on a large scale since it wasn’t worth doing all that work if the harvest only came in less than half the time. So for us weird/unpredictable weather has always been the norm. To give you perspective, our last drought featured 9 months straight with pretty much zero rain, highlighted by reaching 40 C on the first day of spring as ash rained out of the sky. At the other extreme, last year we had 9 months straight of mud, with the highlight coming in the form of over a meter of rain falling in a three day period.
Annuals can still be useful under these conditions, but you have to be prepared to skip seasons, and to grow varieties that don’t need a huge amount of work to establish (so a crop failure isnt as big a blow). You also need a range of perennial crops that persist through bad/irregular weather, plus stable foodstuffs that can be stored for long periods of time.
Maybe a future where huge centralised civilisations are no longer possible wont be the worst thing in the world. If it is impossible for the despotic king to threaten the peasants unless they grow huge grain surplusses, then maybe we will have to get by with smaller monuments to the gods.
. I can deal with pump, but lots of people do it manually and this kinda of dryness it’s not really possible to compensate missing rainfall. Other thing that makes thing worse is that usually heatwaves have been shorter and they have ended with thunderstorms. It’s even a saying in finnish language. Not anymore. It’s like week maybe two week of heatwave and little rumbling in the skies (maybe couple mm of rainfall if lucky) with couple days cooler and then another heatwave. Heat does help me to bridge the cap with some crops that would not make it in coolest summers so it’s kinda double edged sword. Hopefully could get more normalish summers and not like hot, hot, cold, cold etc because it really makes it hard to adabt to certain climate if there is none.