Because I Have No Garden Journal

I have meant, and keep meaning, to make a Gardening Journal, where I can record all those things I always forget, like how much it rained.

Even after all this time, knowing good and well I can't remember stuff from hour to hour sometimes, much less days later, I still find myself saying "I'll remember it later".

I've been recording a lot of my gardening things here in my blog so I can look back and find it again later, but not every time it rains.

For the past week (or so) we've been having weather similar to July:  bright, clear sunny mornings, temps in the upper 80's - low 90's, and a chance of a pop-up thunder shower in the afternoon/evening.

I know we didn't get any rain yesterday, or the two days before that, and I think we didn't on Memorial day. Before that, no idea.
There were a couple of days where we only got thunder and no rain. That happens here a lot. We live in some sort weird weather circle where it will rain north, south, west and/or east of us, but not here.
We've literally watched rain on the radar move in from the west, hit the Georgia line and split apart, going north and south of us, and we won't get anything.

Many times, I've told J a million times about this but I think he thinks I'm nuts, storms will build up/develop right in our back yard and go rain on the county to the east of us.

Thunder storm building in our back yard.

J works in the county to the east of where we live, so he pretty much sees rain nearly every day over there. When he's at home and it clouds up like in the picture above, he starts readying for rain. He'll tell me we have to hurry and do whatever we're doing to get finished before the rain comes, or if I hang laundry out on the line he'll say like I better hope it don't rain on it.

But I know if it's clouding up in the backyard, most of the time, we're not going to get anything here.

(The picture doesn't do it justice, but the sun was shining so bright and pretty on my clean, white sheets yesterday. I thought I hadn't such a beautiful sight in such a long time.)

I'm not claiming to be any kind of weather-predictor or such, but it's not exactly rocket-science to figure if there's a chance of scattered afternoon showers, if you do your laundry in the morning and get it hung out early, it'll be dry well before any showers pop up later in the afternoon or evening.

Today though, was something different. I can't really explain it, but this morning outside just looked...sickly, or something. Yellow-y, but different from Sunny, or watery maybe. I don't know how to describe it, anyway it was different.
So when I washed a small load of whites this morning, I dried most of them in the dryer, and the 2 t-shirts and sports bra I wanted to air dry, I hung on hangers and hanged from the ceiling fan on the back porch.

Sure enough, about 2 in the afternoon, it started thundering, and got dark, and came a lovely downpour.
I ran out and set my buckets and watering cans out to collect rainwater, and set my plants near the edge of the porch so they could get a good splashing.

We got a good downpour, but they had Severe thunderstorms to the East and North of us, with big lightning and even some hail. Which is why I don't complain a whole bunch that we don't get the same weather as everyone else around us, even though it leaves us kind of dry at times.

After the storm rained out and it cleared off again, I went out on the back porch to check things out, and I would swear the tomatoes had grown a few inches just since a few hours ago. Also the Catawba (worm) tree has bloomed with flowers that I'm pretty sure weren't there this morning.