Natural History Notes



Friday, February 03, 2006

weather update

Well, hallelujah, it's raining again. Third weekend in a row. It's been drizzling half the night; the rain barrel is full again, but it's sure not enough to fill up the lakes, break the drought, or cancel the fire ban.

If the warm weather keeps up, we may start getting green growth which I suppose would let the county cancel the ban. So far there is a tiny bit of greening in the grass, but none of the blooming henbit and chickweed that you would expect in this mild weather. There is a tiny bit of chickweed beginning to grow in the pot by the front steps that usually is full of it in the winter.

The weather summary for January is peculiar. Here it is - this is an image file, not text - click on it to get a bigger version. I couldn't format text to fit the journal page width, sorry.


High temps generally between 60 and 80 (up to 84°!), lows 30 to 50, and just two rains in the whole month, though the total is not that far below the 2" normal. But Europe's in a deep freeze, and here we are ten or twenty degrees above our usual relatively balmy normal!

There is not a single winter honeysuckle blossom, but at least the plants seem to mostly be alive. I'm going to have to wait and see about the native red honeysuckle vines. The white japonica and Isabel's lilac in the front yard have green twigs, to my great relief. Maybe the results of the drought won't be as bad as I feared. We'll have to see how the trees come out.