Great/Awful Fall Weather

The weather for the past 5 weeks has been both great and awful at the same time; great temperatures, warm days, cool nights, no frosts yet, sunny, beautiful, glorious, but the near complete absence of rain has produced a mini drought, and people who did not faithfully water shallow-rooted and/or newly installed plants will find come spring a lot of "winter kill". Farmers have been overjoyed with these weather conditions and the crop harvest has been going very well indeed. Yesterday it was obvious a front was moving in, and the morning dawned dreary and over cast, and now some rain has come, not too heavy, not too light, and maybe if we are lucky it will keep up all day and all night and all of tomorrow. After 5 weeks of essentially no rain, the ground is parched and it will take a lot of rain to soak in deeply. If the area only gets a half inch or so, it will fool the amateurs, who will now have an excuse to not water. And already the weather goof balls are saying "maybe the rain won't last too long" as if this were a bad thing. Strangely it seems that weather people are never garden people. Rain is just what the bok choi needs. This late Indian summer will push the cool weather fall chores way into November, and this isn't good because it's only one month before the Phactor heads out to Costa Rica with my rainforest ecology class. Too little time and too many things to do!