March 20, 2006
you don't need a weatherman...
But you might need an Almanac. Sitting here at my window watching the rain fall on my just-interred plantlets I got to thinking about how long this late winter (ah, today is the first day of spring) monsoon might linger, a longer rainy season portending some unusual benefits for the gardener (longer planting season for perennials and biennials) and some disappointing drawbacks (wait and wait and wait for the right time to plant annuals and food crops).
This winter I didn't have to worry about frost killing the dwarf Meyer lemon in its terra cotta pot, or the cymbidiums. But who could have predicted multiple hail events? Pretty much made mush of the camellias, and turned the delicate ivory pinwheels of the Clematis armandii to crumpled spotted spokes. I was watering by hand in December to keep potted things alive that had emerged during the unexpected warm and windy days. But in March it looks like a few California native buckwheats succumbed to too much rain (is that possible?). I did plant my sweet pea seeds but now I wonder if they have drowned or been devoured by slugs. The slug poison seems to have been diluted to mere indigestion levels or washed away altogether.
Out of curiosity I went browsing for some historical weather data for my bit of the planet....
For the San Francisco Bay region (from the Wine Country north of the bay to Silicon Valley in the south, and including the Santa Cruz coastal mountains and the east Bay coastal hills) average rainfall ranges from as much as 60 inches a year (that's 5 feet - or to the top of my head) in the Santa Cruz mountains, to 14 inches (could slosh your Wellingtons) in the Silicon (nee Santa Clara) Valley.
In San Jose in 1918, four days of rain in September (a highly unusual month for rain in this region) swamped the entire prune plum crop that had been set out on the ground to dry, prompting one observer to remark that "Every corner of the valley smelled like a distillery..." Needless to say, there were no prunes that year for sufferers of irregularity.
Rainstorms in 1861, 1918, and 1982 were "100,000 year events" bringing deluge and floods to the Bay Area. Considering the frequency of these events it might be suggested that they be renamed "60-year events so far".
There have been nine El Nino/La Nina (boy/girl) years since 1950, the year this badly-named and near incomprehensible oceanographic/climatological phenomenon was "discovered". Recent research reveals absolutely no correlation between El/La events and more or less rainfall on the Pacific coast. However, all TV weather persons continue to report on it like we are supposed to know what to do about it.
January is supposedly the most reliable rainy month in the Bay Area. But, looking at rainfall totals in downtown Oakland from 1971 to 1993 indicates that in any given January, rainfall can be zero to eleven inches.
This year we're at 130 percent of normal rainfall--at 22 inches and still raining. I think I'll go out and check on my sweet peas....
