We got another 1.5 inches of rain last night.  That brings our total since mid-week to 2.25 inches.  If we reach the nineties as is predicted, it is going to be steamy around the Southern Outer Banks this afternoon.

After a parched June and early July, the rains have really hit us.  In the last four to five weeks, we have gotten close to ten inches of rain according to my calculations which happen to match what the government has observed if you know how to find our spot on the White Oak on their map.

That ten inches is basically 2.5 inches of rain per week which is more than we need this time of year.  All the rain in a short time period is certainly part of the reason that I had to pull my tomato plants out this week.  Tomato wilt had set in even on my new plants.  With rains this frequent and heavy, it is not worth fighting the wilt.

While it looked like the fog was about to dissipate when I started writing this post,  the shallow fog seems to have rolled back into the area.

In other weather news this morning, it looks like Tropical Depression 6 is strengthening and will likely become a Tropical Storm and eventually a Hurricane.  With luck it will head north and perhaps graze the Canadian Maritimes where we used to live.

I talked to one of my Canadian friends, George, who lives in northern New Brunswick.  He and his wife Alberta, live near Hartland, NB.  Their Saint John River Valley home is about 150 miles by road from the Bay of Fundy or about 110 miles as the crow flies. 

Yesterday morning it was 40F when he got up. We were thirty degrees warmer here on the Crystal Coast.

George is expecting a frost within the next two or three weeks.  They have seen almost no rain for the last two months.  Apparently many of the streams have been reduced to a trickle.

Our first home in Canada was an old farm on the other side of the Bay of Fundy about thirty five miles farther east.  Fortunately they had early rains in the summer, and the crops are in pretty good shape.

We met George and Alberta after we moved to our farm in Tay Creek, NB and became serious cattle people with a herd that eventually numbered over 200 head of red and black Angus cattle.

We called our farm, Tay Ridge Angus.  You can actually see it very well on this Google Map.  Our house was at the red pointer and the two hundred acres of fields and woods ran straight back from it.  It is now a bed and breakfast.

The southern boundary of the farm is now marked by the Mack Plume road.  When we owned the farm, it was just a farm road that I used to maintain our fences.  The government has been mining a gravel pit at the back of the farm so it got upgraded.

The winding road going back directly from the red marker is the road back to the woods where I used to winter our cattle.  It was a challenge keeping the road open during NB's snowy winters.

Our ten years on the farm were a neat time in our lives.  Our children were all born there, and I learned how important weather is in the lives of farmers.  A dry fall can mean you have to start feeding hay earlier. In New Brunswick where you have to feed hay from early November to early May in the best of years, another month of feeding hay is a huge expense.

I wish that I could share some of Carteret County's recent rains with the farmers of New Brunswick.  However, I know that the rains will come to them just as surely as they came to us.  This year it was too late for the Carteret County corn crop. Next year I hope that they will fare better.

The dry weather in June meant we had a wonderful tomato crop.  Drought means little to my tomatoes since it is easy to water a few tomato plants.  Tomato plants love sun and heat so they thrived this summer until the rains came.

Perhaps that Tropical Depression can brush the Maritimes just enough to busy some moisture their way.

From the looks of it, our rains are not done for the day.