When temperatures dropped this week, welcoming a new season like clockwork, Julieanna Purdue felt a small sense of relief.

“It’s a refreshing change,” said Purdue, a Central Whidbey farmer. “It was a very hot, dry summer.”

Purdue wasn’t complaining.

The warmer weather this past summer produced some unusual results at the Prairie Bottom Farm she operates with her husband Wilbur on Ebey’s Prairie in Coupeville.

“We were able to grow watermelon and cantaloupe right out in the field,” she said.

Farmers from Central and North Whidbey gushed about a summer that not only provided more heat units, but also interspersed enough rain to provide favorable growing conditions for a variety of crops.

Sunshine in late spring got berry growers off to a fast start, while harvesters of alfalfa and other grasses were able to get in more cuttings than usual this year with the timely rain being the key.

Vegetable growers in general raved about this year’s bumper crops.

“It made me wish I planted melons,” said Sheila Case-Smith, who runs the Case Farm in Oak Harbor. “We’ve been averaging temperatures right about 10 degrees above normal all summer long.

“I think if we hadn’t had a good irrigation system, we would have said, ‘It would have been too dry.’ As long as you can get an inch of water on the ground each week, things grow like crazy.”

It wasn’t the heat wave felt in Seattle, where temperatures reached 80 degrees or higher for at least 40 days for the second summer in a row, but Whidbey’s marine-cooled temperatures were warmer than usual.

The average air temperature in Central Whidbey during the months of June, July and August was 60 degrees — higher than any of the past three years — according to data recorded at a weather station at the Ebey Road Farm on Ebey’s Prairie.

The station is part of the Washington State University Ag Weather Net, which is working to add a second weather station on South Whidbey.

The average high temperature in Central Whidbey during that same three-month span was 70 degrees, according to David Broberg, owner of the Blue Goose Inn in Coupeville, which houses a weather station on its roof.

There were six days with temperatures of 80 degrees or higher, doubling the total from last year, Broberg said.

Karen Bishop, manager of the Whidbey Island Conservation District and Central Whidbey farmer, said the combination of warm weather and timely rain made for an exceptional growing season.

She pointed to data collected at the WSU Ag Weather Net station that revealed 2.66 inches of rainfall from June through August this summer. That compares to 1.62 inches in 2013, 3.7 inches in 2012 and 1.03 inches in 2011.

“If you look back in 2012, it was just kind of a wetter, cooler summer,” Bishop said. “This was a warmer summer with those interspersed rains. There was almost an inch of rain in August, an inch of rain in June and a half-inch of rain in July. That was the golden key there.”

The warm temperatures were felt near Crescent Harbor as well, resulting in a bounty of vegetables from Roy and Tricia Miller’s family garden at Pacific Wind Farms in Oak Harbor.

They grew so many vegetables in their 155-feet-by-50-feet garden patch that they are considering selling produce at the Oak Harbor Farmers Market in 2015.

“My tomatoes are going crazy,” Roy Miller said. “We grew jalapeños and (other) peppers, too.”

But it was a mixed blessing. The Millers’ farm is based on growing Christmas trees, which don’t welcome too much heat.

Some new plantings didn’t survive.

“The dryer it is, the more you’ve got to water the trees,” Roy Miller said. “We’re working on getting an irrigation system ready for the trees.”