Rain

Well it's early afternoon and at last we've had some decent rain showers. According to our weather system 9.6mm has fallen so far today. This translates into a gain of 3 inches of rainwater in our cistern.

Yes, sorry about the mixing and matching of measurements - we've got a home-made measuring stick marked in inches for the cistern (fewer lines to draw than if we'd marked it up in centimetres), but have attempted to modernise by measuring everything to do with the weather station in metric units. I think we come from a generation which is completely confused about systems of measurement and Canada seems to be just as confused as the UK, but often in the opposite direction. It doesn't help when they call Imperial units 'English'. I've had to stick a small concordance table of oven temperatures in °F and °C in one of the kitchen cupboards, which I check frequently, as this oven is calibrated in Fahrenheit and I'd got used to Celsius in England. On the other hand I do quite like having the road signs in kilometres, as subconsciously you read them as miles and journeys seem to go more quickly (which is necessary when the speed limit is only 50mph, sorry, 80kph, most of the time).

Since we put the weather station up on 6 August and until today we'd only had 7.6mm of rain - about one third of an inch - in nearly three weeks. And there hadn't been much before we started measuring it either. Our lawn is completely brown and a lot of the trees are beginning to show signs of stress - the poplars are losing their leaves rapidly and the leaves on some of the smaller ash trees are turning brown. The rain is particularly welcome as on Tuesday evening I sowed some of the buckwheat seed in the two vegetable plots that we'd created by then, so this might give it a fighting chance of germinating.