As I mentioned this morning, the first storm since spring delivered a bit more than an inch and a half of rain before dawn on Wednesday, ending the fire season. The second storm is here right now. It is expected to be followed by a continuous series of storms that will provide rain through Monday, showers through Thursday, more rain on Friday, and showers . . . forever!
It is now the rainy season.
The video above shows what rain does. It gets things wet. It is, after all, composed of water. It falls mysteriously from the sky, which, as you can plainly see, is occupied only by a mostly monochromatic gray cloud cover. Seriously! There is nothing else up there. There is no one on the roof with a hose or anything of the sort. All that water just falls from the cloud cover above.
I could not get video of individual raindrops falling. They are too small and too fast. Only a few can be seen indirectly in the video, falling in front of the water cascading from the rusted out gutter. The spots on the video are raindrops that landed on the lens, so were no longer so animate. The cascading water is, of course, an accumulation of many raindrops that fell on the roof.
Besides ending the long fire season, rain also disrupts the slim fall color season, when foliage of certain deciduous trees turns color as the weather cools in autumn. There is not much to brag about anyway. Only a few native trees are moderately colorful. More colorful exotic trees are not very popular because they do not color as well as they do where autumn weather is cooler.
Before the rain, these birches were a nice clear yellow, but were already defoliating. Their fallen leaves were as pretty on the ground as they were in the trees, but unfortunately needed to be blown. By now, there is likely more on the ground than there is in the trees, but it will need to be blown too. At least it gets to stay on the open ground in the rest of the casual landscape.
The only tulip tree here got cool enough to defoliate before the birches this year, but not quite cool enough to color well first. It is a grand tree nonetheless. We do not expect exemplary color in autumn in our splendidly mild climate anyway. The sweetgums will compensate. They are only beginning to color, and should hold some of their foliage rather well through the weather.
Tony Tomeo 
Well, at least the fire season is over! It’s interesting your sweet gums haven’t colored yet–they CAN be pretty spectacular with whole varieties of colors. Happy rainy season.
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Sweetgums are the most reliable tree for such color here. They just color a bit later when the weather gets cool enough for them. Because it does not get very cold here, sweetgums can hold their colored foliage rather late. Those that color latest sometimes hold their color until it gets displaced by new growth in spring. It can not hang on any longer as the stems swell. PIstache, flowering pear and ginkgo are also reliable for color, but do not stay as colorful as long.
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I’m so glad your fire season has at last come to an end! Does it mean that, until the rain really penetrates the ground the runoff will give you mudslides and floods? I hope not.
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The first storms are the messiest, but do not cause mudslides or floods right away. The creek outside barely came up, and will go back down shortly after the rain stops. The ground was quite dry after summer, so absorbs quite a bit of water. Floods and mudslides happen after the ground is saturated. It can happen early in the season if the rain continues for a long time. It is more likely later in the season.
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I am glad you are getting rain but hard to say when enough will be enough. 🙂 I watched a video about a Native American praying for rain. He didn’t actually pray for it, he just stepped intoa circle and visualized it. Within a few hours is started raining and rained for days until everything was flooded. He said the problem with praying for rain was they could never figure out how to get it to stop. LOL!
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That was a problem for the famous rainmaker Charles Hatfield, who was blamed for devastating floods and a dam failure in the San Diego region more than a century ago.
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Reblogged this on Tony Tomeo and commented:
Although the rainy season started nearly two months ago, it is still gratifying to remember the later beginning of the rainy season three years ago.
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