A little drought relief

A band of mild-mannered thunderstorms rolled through the are about 3 am and we became aware of this when a nervous cat clambered onto the bed to tell us about it.  She doesn't like the noise and needs some reassurance.  Things were so very dry that watering required making tough decisions about what to water next, and it was not actually possible to keep up.  It had been so long since the last rain that a spider had built a web down inside the rain gauge, and this sort of webbed up the works, but the storms provided somewhere near 3/4s of an inch of rain giving us just a bit of breathing room.  Hardly know what to do today without watering.  If this type of late summer hot weather drought becomes a regular pattern then some plants may become untenable in this area, e.g., red maple is already iffy.  Plant more oaks people.  A long dry spell also gives you an opportunity to see a lot of poor watering, just wetting the surface and doing no real good at all.  Watering must be long and slow; it takes patience and depending upon the sprinkler and area, one to several hours.  A nozzle on a hose is for washing your car; it's not for watering plants.