Rose Season Called Off

wah-wahnt...wah-wahnt..wah-wahnt...We interrupt your regularly scheduled garden blog for this important weather announcement:  There will be no regularly scheduled finale to the garden rose season in the Flint Hills because of inclement weather, botrytis blight, wind, and general calamity.

I declare the drought here officially ended as of last night, but I also entirely give up on the roses this year.  Every time recently that we have had a few days of sun and something approaching a normal blossom was starting to open, either the skies or the north winds opened up their attack on my garden and put the kibosh on every rose that was in the process of developing a bud.

As of noon yesterday, we had received 11.14 inches of rain since January 1st, 2011, and we were still 1.6 inches behind average (although that was better than the 5 inches we were behind at the start of May).   Forecasters predicted a 30% chance of rain for Manhattan during the day and evening of June 1st.  During the day, two small showers came through and my two rain gauges (one near the house and the other in the vegetable garden), registered a respectable 0.4 inches of rain when I emptied them at 6:30 p.m.  Then, about 10:00 p.m., a lightning storm and downpour started that continued through 4:00 a.m.  I woke up several times during the storm, checking to see if we were under a tornado warning and believing we had successive bands of rain moving past.  At 3:00 a.m., I was considering investigating the exact length that comprises a "cubit" in case I had need of it.  Unusually for this area, it was not successive fast-moving bands, but a single tropical storm that formed and sat on us all night long.  The radar picture above, captured courtesy of my new Ipad2, looked almost exactly the same during the whole night.

This morning, my rain gauges both registered 4.7 inches of rain.  Since they are only 5 inch gauges, I don't know if we that is all that fell in the past 12 hours or whether the gauges filled at some point and the additional drops coming in were splashing out more then they added.  So the 5.1+ inches of rain I recorded should put the area out of the drought, at least temporarily.  The yard and beds are sopping wet and my anticipated roses are hanging down limply off their stems.  Such is the life of a rose-nut in the Kansas Flint Hills.  In the next few weeks I'll post a few more rose blogs, but the best pictures will have to wait for the second wave of the remonant roses.  If, and only if, they don't bake in the July sun.

Turning on the news this morning, I almost felt guilty for planning this blog after finding out that Springfield Massachusetts was hit by a tornado last night.   Killer tornados in Massachusetts?  Good grief, what's next?  A tidal wave in the Great Plains?