I have been interested in the weather since I was a little girl when I
constructed a weather station in our backyard and made a hygrometer out of a
milk carton, broom straw and a piece of my long blond hair.
Being a gardener gives me an excuse to be somewhat obsessed with the
weather. After all it's important to know when your first and last frost
dates are, how much rain you've had this past week and if you need to go out
a protect things because it's going to get REALLY cold tonight.
As soon as we got settled here I bought a min/max thermometer and starting
keeping daily records of our highs and lows. More than anything this just
gave me a nudge to pay attention to the rhythm of the weather here.
It taught me that our first frost is almost always the last week of October
right around Halloween. Our last frost is usually in mid April but can be
much much earlier. I learned that because our springs are long and cool I
could ignore the instructions on seed packets about weeks before last frost
and just pay attention to when it got warm enough to keep the plants happy.
In other words, don't bother to plant your tomatoes out until the middle of
May or the beginning of June because their leaves will just turn purple and
the plants will whine even if they don't get frosted.
After a few years, I got a rain gauge. This is a great boon to watering.
Traditional guidelines say that you should provide one inch of water to your
garden each week. When the temperatures begin to warm up I put my rain gauge
out and thus have learned that even if it still LOOKS damp out there, that
often times in May we're not getting rain on this gray misty days and that I
need to start watering the main garden so it doesn't get so dry that it's
hard for the drip irrigation to work right.
