My garden on the whole looks really sad right now but still alive, here on Vancouver Island we have had the driest 3 months in recorded history (114 years). We are on level 2 watering restrictions at present, we can water twice a week but not between the hours of 10 and 4. We can still water containers etc. anytime as long as we have a hand held shutoff. I fully expect it to get worse before it gets better. Thankfully my 5 45?gal rain barrels are full but I'm not touching them until we get down to the nitty gritty. Oh course this is the year I decided to rip everything apart and redo so things aren't established and doing their thing yet.

We did have a good rain the other night, the first in months so I didn't have to water today and today was a little on the cool side so that's helping a lot. We are not use to having temps in the high 80's and 90's for such a long stretch especially in June, June can be a wet month here but not this year. They say it's going to get hot again, d*mn it.

Annette

The northeast's lack of rain mirrors the beginning of the season. Was it 4 weeks without rain? How often was rain predicted and never materialized? The day before yesterday many plants reached the tipping point and wilted. I'd been watering planted -in-sun shade loving hydrangeas all along; their wilting was expected but would not be fatal. Suddenly the shade border was dry; hostas were starting to get limp, the shrub dogwoods wilted and started to yellow; conifers a bit droopy, european ginger was lying prostrate and the thalictrum was getting crispy. Couldn't find the sprinkler. The hose is one of narrow, light weight ones that gives a pitiful stream of water. So I hand watered for hours. Recruited my husband and we got two 10 gallon buckets and filled and dumped, filled and dumped. Now I need to get an emergency supply of mulch so the water doesn't just evaporate.

Here on the east coast the lack of rain is inconvenient and may be expensive....plant loss and water bills. It hurts because a very important part of our lives- gardening- has developed around predictable precipitation in the growing season. The drought out west is life challenging and entire economies are threatened. This is a case where I also feel uncomfortable complaining about 'inconvenient/challenging' when there is real suffering.

However, I hope we can complain about our relative miseries among friends!

We had a terribly wet June and then it's like the rain disappeared. I, of course, planted 3 azaleas before the stretch of dry weather, so it's been a struggle to keep them happy while they settle in. I have a few plants yellowing (namely my water-loving sweetspire). But overall nothing too bad. I'll take dry over my basement flooding and standing water.

Here in KC that's pretty typical for mid to late summer, although this year we've had plenty of rain. Two or three years back it was so dry that people were advised to water around their foundations occasionally to try and keep them from shifting due to the shrinking, dried out soil next to them. Around my neighborhood, which is older, a lot of lawns dried out pretty bad and were subsequently invaded with more drought-resistant weeds. I saw a lot of dead conifers around.

Out in the suburbs irrigation systems are common, but to me the better (and much cheaper) strategy is to plant drought-tolerant natives. This has really caught on here in public/commercial plantings, but not so much yet in residential ones.

What about a gravel garden? I've heard that's a good way to plant more drought-tolerant things in the north and east where it's usually wetter. Here's Roy Diblik talking about it:

http://wpt.org/Wisconsin-Gardener/Segments/gravel-gardens-drought-tolerant-gorgeous

Interesting video. We did something a bit similar here, brought in a thick layer of sand and then we added gravel on top of that but not as thick as they did in the video. It made a big difference. The roots love it and its easy to water. I can walk around right after a rain and in winter it makes for good drainage, snow melts very quickly, it raised my climate zone somewhat and its also easy to weed, they pull right out. Supplemental watering is also faster and easy to do, it soaks in deep with no runoff and stays damp longer. Before doing this, the soil would dry out and bake hard as a rock in summer, watering was needed all the time and the plants didn't grow nearly as well.

On the downside, the gravel collects seeds and they germinate better. That can be the good news or the bad, for me its a good thing. Its more difficult to make changes because I have to scrape an area clean of gravel before digging, otherwise I bury it or just can't get the shovel down through it. Its not a real big deal but its a factor.

I don't like gravel hardscapes that are too barren and overly planned. Some of the professionally done 'artistic' ones remind me of an outdoor living room that look like they should get regularly swept with a vacuum cleaner rather than being a place for nature. Its like you'd feel you have to leave it like that to maintain the look the designer intended in the same way people think of professionally hired interior decorating. It looks unnatural, controlling and sterile.