Lisa, I would have thought the same thing. Remember the time he reminded everyone in the dead of winter to be sure to wear their ear muffins?

I don't! How funny!

I've not ever heard of La Nada...interesting!!

Y'all are too funny.

La Nada is the name some NASA guy gave to the 'neutral' periods in between La Nina and El Nino. I don't know if I've ever heard meteorologists use the term before, although writers and bloggers use it.

I remember when El Nino and La Nina events seemed pretty scarce and what they now call "neutral" or "La Nada" was jus our common weather pattern with a rare El Nino or La Nina thrown into the mix every now and then. In the last decade or so, it seems like we swing back and forth from La Nina to El Nino a lot more often with very little "La Nada" or neutral conditions in between. I wonder if we'll know what to do/how to act/what to expect if we remain in the neutral phase for a while?

I know one thing. We are incredibly dry here at our house even though it rained last week and I've noticed that grassfires are starting to pop up around the county, which is rare in May, which is usually a very wet and humid month for us. Last May was really rainy and having all that moisture in the ground helped carry us into June in decent shape, but this year is nothing like that at all.

Dawn

Here in Tahlequah it is WAY too dry for this time of year. Haven't had a decent rain in weeks. Though, having said that, someone just North or just South of me may say that they have.

George

Given the fact that rains at my home have been lovely (hoping for another good rain soon-ish)...I am so sorry for those of you that are already feeling d-r-y ... that just should NOT BE this year. This year should be the year of redemption after the H-E-doubletoothpicks of last year (!)

Sharon

Drought monitor map shows that Oklahoma is still under good shape http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DM_state.htm?OK,S

Here is a link that might be useful: OK Drought

This has been a very dry month for us and we need rain. Usually April and May are very wet, so I plant with that in mind. I usually only have to water container plants and the in ground plants rarely need water until deep into the summer. We had to water yesterday. The plants that have been in the ground a long time and have deep roots seem to be just fine, but those more recently planted plants were way too dry.

I picked my first green beans yesterday. It was only about 30-35 pods, so I just tossed them into the other veggies that I had in the steamer and they were great. The odd part is that they were pole beans. The seed originally came from George, and they are my favorite beans and they are always early and produce until frost. I never remember the name, but it is something like Old Fashion Tennessee Greasy Bean. HaHa These are in the ground and growing on a cattle panel. I have a big tub of Kentucky Wonder poles that were volunteers that I moved from the garden and they will have their first crop in a few days. I planted bush beans later and they aren't ready yet and they were the big reason I had to water yesterday. Several leaves just curled and started looking crisp.

I still don't have squash and most of the blooms I have checked are all male blooms. It seems like that always happens for a couple of weeks. I just hope I get some squash before the bugs move in. It was covered with row cover until about a week ago.

I thought my broccoli was heading up, but once I pulled the cover off of it so I could get a better look, it was not forming heads. It has been wilting some each day because the direct sun is stronger than what it got under the row cover. I looked at what I posted last year, and I was picking the last of my broccoli on June 7th, so I guess I'm not too far behind normal. My problem this year was that my plants were very small when they went into the ground. Then I had an insect problem which slowed them down even more. I have the hoops and row cover ready now, so I can cover as soon as I plant in the future.

I think I will be using row cover on a lot of spring crops in the future. I was over-run with Harlequin bugs this year and that has never happened before so I wasn't prepared. I have lots of white butterflies so I hope the broccoli is gone before their eggs start hatching. I noticed a cat on a volunteer dill plant this morning. I don't think the dill I planted has even come up yet.

My tomato plants look much better than they normally do and I'm sure that is directly related to the fact we have been dry rather than wet. My early planted container plants are still ahead, but a few in-ground plants are starting to catch up. I am getting fruit set now, but it is still mostly nickle size or smaller. Our days are in the mid-eighties this week so I should see a lot more by the end of the week.

I haven't had any potato pests yet and my Yukon Golds are yellowing and starting to finish up. The others still look green and healthy.

I put a small sweet potato, saved from last year, into 4 of the huge tomato containers and have now taken cuttings from them and have them inside in water waiting for roots to form. As they are ready, I will add them to holes in the raised bed where onions are growing. They may have to grow together for a few weeks, but I think they will be OK. I really don't have much room until the potatoes, onions, and peas finish up.

Carol,
You got pole beans already!!! that awesome. I have planted pole beans last week only, but our bush beans are producing well, we harvest about 1lb yesterday. I did not have space to plant sweet potatoes, I went ahead and harvested all galric, although they were still green except some yellowing in tips of leaves. Our peas are done, I removed the plants. Our potatoes also yellowing, probably harvest them next week. -Chandra

Chandra, I only had a few seed of this bean last year, but I planted what I had and left them all to make seed. It was late in the year and some of them didn't dry on the vine so I had to let them finish inside. I didn't expect great germination, but it wasn't too bad, and I filled in a few spots later. The vines still look pretty wimpy, but they are producing. The Kentucky Wonder beans are beautiful strong plants, but are several days behind for production. I hadn't planned to even plant KW this year but after they started popping up all over, I just couldn't make myself chop them down, so I moved them instead. I planted another pole bean a couple of weeks ago and they are about 6 inches high now so I should have plenty of beans especially when the bush beans start producing.

I always get anxious this time of year when everyone has early production and I don't. I do still have peas but this week is beginning to hurt them a little.

I'll try to get some pictures later. I may even show you my ghetto garden. LOL

Chandra, I'd say that he Drought Monitor looks good for some parts of OK (roughly 75%), but not for the other 25%. For several weeks now, I've been expecting my county to slip back into the 'Abnormally Dry' category, and on this week's map, the western portion of our county did just that. The rest of the county had that really good rain last week, so didn't make it back into the abnormally dry category this week, but our time is coming. I see it every day and I feel it in my bones---Love County is becoming desperately dry, and we had over an inch of rain in some parts of the county last week. That rain just didn't help enough.

For two days in a row, I have spent a portion of the afternoon at grassfires. Yesterday it was about 5 miles south of our house. Today it was catty-corner across the road and we were out there for a couple of hours. It is incredibly dry out in the fields and pastures and woodlands. The trees that caught fire today just lit up like torches and burned very, very quickly. That is so bad. It also is not typical of the kind of fire activity we normally have in May. It worries me to see these fires beginning to happen regularly in what normally is a nice, wet, green month.

Even worse than the fires is all the grasshoppers. They haven't been present on our property in large numbers yet, but they were present in huge numbers at yesterday's fire. Today I saw more at the fire than I have been seeing in our yard, but that could be because the fire had stirred them up. I am seeing more and more every day after not seeing very high numbers of them in March or April.

My garden looks pretty good, thanks to all the rain that fell through the end of March. April and May rainfall have been very skimpy. Our green yard and pastures are now mostly brown, and the cracks in the ground are bigger every day. It feels more like July out there, in terms of dryness, than May. Between the heat, the spider mites, the increasing numbers of grasshoppers and the grassfires, I feel like we'd been fast-forwarded from May to July just about overnight.

We always leave the cool-season wildflowers standing in the pastures as long as we can so they get a chance to set seed, but I'm going to mow them down tomorrow because they're so dry now that they are a fire hazard. I started today by weed-eating all the tall grasses along fencelines, etc. but there's so much more to be done.

Carol, Your squash and mine should be growing side by side because mine was backwards this year---the female flowers appeared first and they and I waited forever for the male flowers to show up. I've never had it happen backwards before.

We're getting plenty of squash, beans and tomatoes now, but I haven't been home long enough the last two days to pick very much. I picked 60 or 70 tomatoes before the fire pagers went off, but didn't get to pick anything from the big garden today---just from the Peter Rabbit garden and containers, so I need to get outside early tomorrow and get the harvesting done.

We've been in the 90s the last few days---93 today---and with humidity dipping into the 20s in the afternoons, which partly explains why we're having fires. It is too danged hot! All the lovely spring green is just gone. While my garden looks pretty good if you're just walking by it, when you get inside and look closely at plants, you see the signs of heat stress and drought stress.

The trend here in southcentral OK is towards hotter, drier weather than is typical for May and I sure do not like it at all.

The heat sure has rushed the early sweet corn along. We almost always harvest it around Memorial Day weekend. This year it is almost ready for harvest now--I think we'll be harvesting sometime in the next week. Because early corn is already so early to begin with, it is hard for it to produce any earlier than it already does. The plums are ripening faster than I can pick them. First it was just the one tree, but now the second one is starting to ripen fruit, and I saw one plum on the Mexican plum tree today that is starting to turn. I need a little switch here that I can flip to slow everything down.

Dawn

Carol, I have the same problem with that name. But I looked it up. They are "Old Time Long Cut Greasy beans. "

George

Carol/George,

Is it too late to start "Old Time Long Cut Greasy beans"? I have some space under the tomato rows. I am thinking to plant some bush beans and pole beans to cover gaps on bed and trellis. by the way, where I can buy seeds of "Old Time Long Cut Greasy beans"?

Dawn,
Yes definitely need rain. I not water our lawn so far this season. Forecast shows 50% chance of rain on Sunday! I am praying for turning into 100%. Some reason or micro climate, our property received relatively good rain both in terms of the frequency and velocity compared to last year. I hope trend will continue and keep state out of drought.

-Chandra

I messed up on that name, just a bit. It's "Old Timey Long Cut Greasy Bean." In the southern Appalachians, it appears that many folk use the word "timey," instead of just "time."

I'm sure praying for rain! Today I put out more sweet potatoes and another 9' row of Irish potatoes, of a variety called "Chalice," which is supposed to have the genetics to handle heat and drought.

George

Chandra, It's never too late to plant beans!

If the weather gets insanely hot, though, many of them suffer from blossom drop and produce poorly in the heat. However, as long as you keep them well-watered and relatively pest-free, as soon as the weather cools in the fall, they will produce. Some years I have pole beans producing very well in July and August, but other years the heat stalls them until September.

I hope y'all get rain. You have a better chance than we have here--ours is 40%, up this morning from 30% last night, and it is nice and cloudy and cool this morning, so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Our rain has been hit-and-miss, although we had plenty of rain until April arrived. Since April, it has missed our place more than it has hit it, but there are other folks in our county who have been missed by a lot more of the rain and they need rain even more out there in western Love County than we need it here in the center of the county.

I noticed a portion of western OK had a lot of rain overnight. Good for them! Hope the rest of us are as lucky.

George, Y'all sure do need rain and I hope you get it. It will be interesting to see if Chalice does well in Oklahoma.

Dawn