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FAIRBANKS — Tom Mulka finally had to turn on the irrigation system at Fairbanks Golf Course last week.

“I almost went two months without using it,” said Mulka, general manager and pro at the course. “Last week was the first time since July Fourth weekend that I turned it on.”

Consider it Mother Nature’s way of apologizing.

After one of the wettest Julys on record and a miserable start to August, the weather in Fairbanks has taken a turn for the drier in the last 2 1/2 weeks.

While rainfall in August totaled 2.66 inches at Fairbanks International Airport — more than an inch above normal — all that rain fell in the first 17 days of the month.

As of Tuesday, not a drop of rain had fallen at the airport in 17 straight days. It marked the first time in more than 100 years of records that Fairbanks has had a completely dry final two weeks of August, according to a monthly weather summary issued by the National Weather Service in Fairbanks on Monday.

The dry weather came just in time for Mulka.

“The last two weeks have been a huge spike (in business)” the golf pro said. “If this (weather) runs out for another two or three weeks, we’ll come out even.

“To be honest, I think if we had one more bad week of rain, everybody would have given up,” he said. “That last week of July and the first two weeks of August were brutal.”

The heavy rains in July produced major flooding in Fairbanks, Salcha and Nenana in the first week of August, when the Tanana River spilled over its banks. Gov. Sarah Palin declared the Tanana Valley a disaster area and the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management estimated damages caused by the flooding at $10 million.

But the last half of August helped local residents dry out, during what is typically a wet time of year, meteorologist Daniel Robinson said.

“There hasn’t been much energy to move any moisture up in our direction,” Robinson reported. “We’ve just had really weak (air) flow over the last two weeks.”

It’s made for a strange month weather-wise, the meteorologist reported.

“We go through a period where we go down in the record books for the wettest period of all time and follow it up with a long, dry period that goes down in the record books as the driest of all time,” he said. “In the end, it all balances out to about average for the month.”

The mini-drought may come to an end later this week when a low-pressure system from Southwest Alaska drifts into the Interior, meteorologist Eric Stevens said.

“It will be weakened and beat up by the time it gets here, but it might have enough punch left to give us some rain,” he said.

The recent spate of fair weather was too late to offer much help to gardeners. They have suffered through what many consider a sub-par growing season due to cool, wet weather that stunted growth, said Diane Claassen at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension.

“It has helped some things,” Claassen said. “I noticed my peas have a lot more flowers on them the last few days.”

All in all, though, it was a “very strange” year for gardeners, she said.

“Some people could grow zucchini really well and some people couldn’t grow hardly any zucchini,” Claassen said. “I’ve had a lot of calls from people that have very large cabbage leaves and not much for a head, and then I have people that have very big cabbage heads.

“Some people’s potatoes did wonderful, and other people don’t have hardly any potatoes,” she said.

Claassen attributes the weird growing conditions partly to cold soil, which locks up phosphorus, which is necessary for flowering and fruiting. There also was a lack of bees, wasps and other insects, which help pollinate plants.

“I don’t think there was anybody that had a wonderful garden all around,” she said. “Everybody with a garden I talked to had something go wrong. I’ve talked to people with greenhouses who had problems. I’ve talked to people with raised beds who had problems.”

Though many low-lying areas around Fairbanks have endured their first frost, the temperature at the airport still has not dropped to the freezing mark. The low temperature at the airport so far is 37 degrees, though a low temperature of 26 was recorded in the Goldstream Valley.

It doesn’t look like any sub-freezing temperatures are in the forecast this week, Stevens said.

“If people haven’t had a frost yet, it doesn’t look like they’re going to get one in the next few days,” he said.