Is monsoon season finally over?

Finally our five-day forecast is saying no rain. I don't actually remember when we last had a forecast like that. It's definitely been a soggy year for us in Saskatchewan. Our nearest city, Swift Current, about 50 miles away, has had about 21 inches of rain since April 1. Their normal precipitation would usually be about 11 inches. So we're running about double of normal. No wonder it's been so hard to get field work done around here!

Coupled with that wet weather has been a cooler-than-normal spring and summer. April was the last month that had normal temperatures. Every month since has been cooler than normal. Only three days have been over 30 degrees Celcius (86F) when we would normally have a dozen or more. May had us suffering through snow storms while our cows were calving which was rather annoying as we moved calving later to avoid that sort of thing. September has been soggy and cold which is a complete reversal of last year when September turned out to be our hottest month of the year (after another abnormally cool summer).

Fortunately I'm not a large grain farmer so I don't have much to harvest and I'm pretty much done my haying for the year. Plenty of farmers are faced with a late and difficult grain harvest or perhaps don't even have one to harvest as they couldn't even get seeding done due to flooded fields. A news report yesterday said that harvest is about 18% complete this year when the average should be 61% on this date.

A couple of weeks ago a news report said this was the warmest year on record. Perhaps it was...somewhere! I know some of you suffered through 100+ degree days for weeks on end and as someone who thinks it's getting hot when it hits 80 I really felt for ya. But I think I'd have preferred to trade a few degrees for a few inches of rain!