Hallelujah! After a dry fall/winter, with only two mini-mists, we're having a real rain today! The plants are thirstily drinking in the good sky water, after months and months of treated faucet water.
Now, to gird my loins for weeding,weeding, and more weeding as as soon as rain ends (downside)
Upside: getting my tomato seeds into the nice, lovely, welcoming earth.
Persephone
(So. Calif Coastal)
You have to live in So Cal to appreciate one inch or so of rain. I, too, live in the area, and for me it seems that the first rain in Jan or Feb seems to be the actual start of the Spring season, or the weed season, as you pointed out!
I wonder if that's the case in other places like Arizona, Colorado or Texas, for example?
Do weeds start to grow the first day after January or February rains in other places?
Of course, we can always grab our long handled weed tools or weed twisters to get a head start on a growing problem. It's also fun to let some of the green things grow a little to see if there are any surprises.
It's always a wonder how we pray (or dance) for rains and yet fear the clouds. Perhaps that human or humid nature?
Ray =========== Google organic weed tools for the latest hand tool solutions.
This sounds like an erotic novel. :-)
I live in Texas. Although our average rainfall is supposed to be 31 inches, it all comes at one time.
Texas is interesting in that it has 10 distinctive regions. Where I live in Austin, it is still considered to be part of the humid south. We're on par with the southern states of Louisianna, Mississippi, Alabama and north Florida. It's humid here than not.
Yes, but if the weeding is kept up it can be good for the soil as the roots cut through the soil and aerate it. When I weed as I did last few weeks here and there, I did so by forking up a bit of soil as to just loosen it and that way get the entire root.
I never weed out hairy vetch. It stays right there. It fixes nitrogen and is a legume, so welcome all hairy vetch! I don't use corn gluten meal because I have bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, larkspur, nigella and other self sowing wildflowers and they would not germinate if I used any product, organic, natural or synthetic for weed management.
I love the clouds! Gardening here with the sun is very difficult. I have an umbrella attached to my 4 wheel garden cart, so it's always shady over my head, but he heat...oy.
Where I live, we've had 3.47 inches in the current rainy season. Yes, in southern California every 0.01 inch is important.
In Los Angeles, I believe this January was the driest January on record. The Sierra snowpack is less than half the average for this date. Fortunately, the reservoirs are still quite full from the heavy rains of two years ago.
By the way, the rainy season is reckoned to run October through September, to have "years" that don't change in the middle of a storm. However, little or no rain is expected after April or before November.
Reckoned according to whom??
I've been out here nearly 40 years, and we've never, that I can recall had rain after March/April or before November, even in a good rain year.
Remember, I'm talking coastal, and you're in the mountains, from what I can tell.
Persphone
Persephone
The "rain year" is reckoned by the California Department of Water Resources. See , where they call it the "water year".
I'm in Oak Park, which is in the Santa Monica Mountains (little more than hills), about 2.5 miles north of the Ventura Freeway between Thousand Oaks and the San Fernando Valley. In the summer, we get ocean breezes from the Oxnard Plain. See my .
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