Mark recently ran into a gardening friend of mine who asked him if I thought it had been a crazy gardening year. "Oh, Linda thinks every year is a crazy gardening year," was his reply. When he told me this I got rather annoyed until I realized he might be right. It seems like every gardener I know in person — or in the blogging world — is fixated on weather and climate more and more. How can we not be when the weather we were used to and designed our gardens for is fluctuating in ways we've rarely experienced in the past.
This year we lost a lot of trees, shrubs and perennials that were anywhere from a year to 15 years old from a cold winter with no snow until too late to help. Then the cold lingered and we had our biggest snowstorm of the season on April 18th!
Then there was the rain. The official count is a good 10 inches of precipitation above normal for the year — and they measure it at a location that did not get the 10+ inches that our side of town received in August. So who knows how much my garden actually got? And now we are having days where the high temperatures is anywhere from 10 to 20 degrees below normal.
In 2017 I was complaining about above average rainfall and rain events until it suddenly stopped at the end of the summer and we had a dry and extremely hot autumn. 2016 was a year to remember for all the right reasons. Mark and I both tried to enjoy beautiful days with just the right amount of heat, sun and rain — knowing it might be a long time before we would again experience such a year. Just how long is anyone's guess.
