It is official, according to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, as of July 31, 2025, our home is in a small bubble of severe drought, the only area of severe drought in Ontario.
Since July 31, 2025 we have had no rain, it might be extreme drought by now. The complete lack of rain, along with blistering heat and brisk winds has challenged plant life here. Even the weeds are dying. Whole branches of trees have died.
Attila has kept our garden alive through this severe drought, by sheer determination.
We aren’t canning as much this year from the garden, the yield is small, but steady. We can have enough to eat fresh produce from the garden every day. But we aren’t getting enough surplus to preserve anything much for winter. So far we have canned Cowboy Candy (sweet pickled jalapeno peppers) from our garden, tomorrow some pickled banana peppers. At least it is something.
Before the drought hit we managed to freeze peas, and beets.
The agro-climate map.
Because other areas of Ontario are not experiencing severe drought, Ontario grown produce is available in our grocery store. So far we have canned a bushel of Roma tomatoes as salsa, and tomato sauce. We are enjoying fresh peaches, we love fruit in season in Ontario.
This evening it is pretending to rain, we decided to go for a “walk in the rain”. Harrumph. When we got back I could count the raindrops that had fallen on my hat.
Worldly
Weather
19°C
Date: 7:00 PM EDT Tuesday 19 August 2025
Condition: Light Rainshower
(HA! Light is an understatement, you can count the drops. We live in hope.)
Pressure: 101.8 kPa
Tendency: Falling
Temperature: 19.0°C
Dew point: 15.7°C
Humidity: 81%
Wind: NE 17 km/h
Visibility: 24 km
Quote
“And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
Marianne Williamson
1952 –
Oh how I love the human bright lights in my life, the stars in my sky.
Drought years really are rough, especially for those who rely on the produce the grow themselves. I hope you get relief before long.
Meanwhile, in my part of the world, our overall summer has been cooler and wetter than I can remember in the last fifty years (with the exception of two separate weeks of very high temperatures). I really wish there was some way to make things come out more evenly.
Thank you Wendy! We live in hope!
Would it not be just grand to have balanced weather!! You were cool and wet, we were hot and dry…
Of course ours is an anthropocentric perspective, perhaps mother nature has a long term strategy that we are not aware of. Hopefully she will be kind to the innocent!
“You can count the drops,” that is most Yuma “rains”. I wish, too, for a more balanced weather.
We had a burn ban for around a week. Today, it was lifted after we had 3 rains in less than a week, actually every other day it rained. Twice at night we had rain but we could barely tell the next day, but today we had a near steady rain all day long. Unfortunately, I don’t think our watering ban will end in our neighborhood any time soon. Our water pressure issue appears to be because the builder didn’t put in powerful enough pumps to keep the water pressure up when half the neighborhood is watering their lawns or having a shower.
Joan, I have been thinking about you and your weather through this drought, trying to imagine what it would be like if were like this all of the time. Certainly the plant and animal life here would alter significantly! Balanced weather would be oh so lovely!
Teri, thank goodness for burn bans, now that the landscape is a tinderbox.
So glad you got rain! I do not envy you your water situation at all. The farm where I grew up had a dug well that went dry by June, so that we had to have water delivered to it by the truckload. We had to conserve water in everything we did. Not surprisingly, we had an outhouse that was used during the summer months, as it used no water.
Our fields needed irrigation, a truck with a huge tank of water would drive to the edge of the field and a sprinkler system would be hooked up to it. This seemed to do the job, we had lovely crops of strawberries, cherries, peaches, plums, grapes and apples. Expensive though.
Apparently a drilled well would have been so deep that the cost was astronomical, hence bringing in water by truck load.
We have a well here, it is not connected to anything, Attila feels there is no need. He might be reconsidering that decision!
I wish we could send you some of our rain. It’s been a much wetter summer in the US Midwest.
Sandy, wouldn’t that be just grand, less for you, more for us, everyone happy!
Too much rain is also problematic, I think it might be easier to add water, than to take it away, for gardens.
It is a year of extreme weather around the globe. It is just a fluke that we live in a very small bubble of severe drought in Ontario, it is dry in the rest of the province, but this little bubble is the driest in the province.