Early rain for 2005

Last night a band of thunderstorms moved in from the South and started lighting up the sky around midnight here in the San Fernando Valley. I had expected this to be a fast moving storm without much rainfall, but instead it has settled into a day-long gentle rain with periods of showers.

This is very early in the season for us to get such significant rainfall. My journal shows that the first rainfall in 2003 was on Halloween night. This has come more than a month earlier.

Of course, this is not our usual Winter storms, which come out of the Northwest, so it is possible that we might not see rain again until next month or beyond. Only time will tell if I need to keep irrigating or can let nature take its course for another season.