Paleocene

It doesn't look great this year because MBY has been relatively dry. Ignore my sad garden lol. Basic story: we bought the house in 2022, very close to the Silver Spring metro in one of the nearby single family neighborhoods. It's on a roughly 50' x 200' lot, so it's a very deep narrow backyard behind the house. It was owned by an older gent who lived alone, and did the absolute bare minimum. I'm talking mow the lawn and that's it - he let a few azaleas grow, but didn't plant anything. Rhododendrons in the back quarter of the yard were overrun by wild grape and other vines. There was a mix of turf grass, weeds, and vines back there. But a lot of it was just urban/suburban weedy unkempt mess. In the summer of 2023 I noticed we had a decent number of fireflies. Less than what I shared in that video above, but enough to notice and appreciate. So I looked into a bit and decided to just let the back quarter of the yard be "wild" - I don't cut the grass, and I use a weedwacker on the more annoying vines that are trying to climb shrubs and trees I'm planting. The grass is scrubby this year because of a lack of rain - in previous years it was more of a rolling field of grain type look. My brother lives in upstate NY on 16 acres of former farm field which is now a meadow slowly returning to forest. He has an absolutely insane number of fireflies that put on a show like in my video, but scaled up by 50x. So I'm trying to replicate that in miniature. I've added a few native trees (swamp white oak, tulip poplars that grow from seedlings and are now 10+ feet tall just in a few years, red maple, red and white oak); and reclaimed the rhododendrons. I think the other important thing I do is drop a bunch of leaf litter back there. Instead of putting it all on the curb in November, I go back there and dump 4-5x trash cans worth of birch, poplar, oak, etc leaves all over the place. I'm a bit worried that the "meadow" is this year losing a battle to wild grape, morning glory, virginia creeper, and even some english ivy that is just everywhere around here. I may have to eventually rent some sort of turf grinder/soil churner type device and replant wildflowers and native grasses. However, 2026 is definitely the best firefly year of the past 4. Sorry for the digression! Back to weather. It's nice out because it's cloudy.

https://streamable.com/010pjd Backyard fireflies peaking in silver spring. This is after three years of curating their habitat with a couple hundred square feet of "meadow" and dumping leaf litter in a few areas. Everyone should do it!

Hey, that's me! Getting some decent rain the past hour or so though.

Got fringed on the first round and missed the strong storms of round 2 to the south last night, picked up 0.25" ish from the combo. Drizzle this morning...hoping to make it to an inch

Northwest flow is great in Ohio right now. Taking my older kid to cedar point today (he's in the roller coaster phase of early teen years). Sunny, crisp, low humidity, 10/10

Electric in my backyard last night, doing the shimmering/flickering deal. Everyone should leave some high grass and leaf piles in a few patches to give them a fighting chance. I'm just a few blocks from the asphalt and concrete canyons of downtown silver spring... But I have many lightning bugs

These days make the 95-100F with 70 dew point days tolerable

10/10 morning right now

Love the 90 degree day tracking. Who's tracking 70+ degree dew point days? Yesterday was a nice respite but back over 70 here inside the beltway. Yuck. Slightly more tolerable with cloud cover and a breeze

I saw on reddit that it was the blue angels, tho I didn't catch it. Practice for the 4th, perhaps?

Just noticed that. Looks potentially soggy for much of DC-Balt around 7am

First fireflies visible tonight in the yard. Probably my favorite thing about June around here.

Hot

Another gorgeous morning - comfortable dew points for the whole work week ahead? Sign me up for that, any week june thru sept.

Yikes, the ensembles are not pretty for total rainfall for the next couple weeks. Posting the canadian for no real reason, the others all tell the same dry story:

Yep. Did a bit better than you last week with the drizzle here, but my veggie garden is already thirsty as heck after two sunny days

Those March through May numbers are rough. Hope the El nino juice heads your way

Impossibly nice outside right now. This is like a 1 out of 100 type day in the greater DC region

I saw an orange glow to the east at sunrise. Back to gray now

Steady drizz and showers all day in silver spring. Maybe a half inch by now? Can't complain, need it.

Most/all rain sitting just north of silver spring since the 4pm hour. We got some showers then. Didn't amount to much. But just a few miles away looks soaked

send some of that up this way. silver spring is going to just be "silver" soon

Pretty decent agreement on the ensembles for an inch or so of rain over the broad area of the forum, over the next 7 days. Hope it pans out. We need a lot more than that.

Cooking

Snap pea plants are flowering -- snacktime soon