Climatic Recompense

We spent the entire summer in drought, with temperatures above 100° F (38C) more than 50 days (our previous record). It was rough, but not dramatic. Rare is the summer we don’t see such temperatures at least some days, so this was just more of them. Granted, we did see it reach 120° F (49C) once or twice and that’s rare. Still, it was not really remarkable.
What is remarkable is almost this entire month has been quite nice. In Oklahoma, we typically have a brief spate of comfortable days, usually three weeks tops, before we fire up or drop off into nasty weather. But we’ve had decent weather the whole month. The air conditioning has been off almost the whole time, and I put on long sleeves for a few brief hours one morning. For Central Oklahoma, a whole month of that is like heaven on earth.
The only thing still making me frown is all the apple and pear trees in this area produced bitter, pithy little knobs. They should be ripe about now, but they are inedible. I just managed to get a decent crop from our early apple tree out back by watering it every day. The tomato plants were almost useless, and lots of other garden vegetables just did not take the heat well. The strawberries survived and are now taking over their end of the garden. We still have bell peppers producing. That’s it.
All in all, though, this long spell of mild weather is just about fair recompense for all the heat. The weather folks expect it to stretch up into next month a ways. It’s almost like living in a civilized land.