It's dry here too. not much left but tomatoes and peppers and squash. have some watermellons if they make on their own.

It is dry here also. All the rains seem to miss me. I think the TV weather here only reports the big rain amounts which always seem to be in Kansas and north of me. Maybe most people are not getting rain either but are less aware than someone like me with too too many plants.

It is dry here too.

I'm yanking out the paste tomato plants this week as soon as I am through harvesting all the ripe tomatoes/breakers from them because I decided up front I wouldn't irrigate them since we didn't need to can much.So far, the only tomato product I've been canning is Annie's Salsa and, by the end of the week, I've be through with the salsa canning. The remaining tomato plants may produce through the end of July. We'll see. It is awfully dry and they look awfully tired and stressed.

I intend to water the cantaloupes, watermelons, winter squash, cucumbers and hot peppers at least once a week to keep them going.

The southern peas I planted in the former potato beds are about 6" tall and ought to be able to get by on very little water so I'm not real worried about them. I might water them when I water the melons. We are just now starting to harvest watermelons so I'd like to keep them alive at least until we've harvested the melons that already have attained a decent size. They're mini refrigerator type melons so they top out around 7-12 lbs. and don't need a lot of water (not compared to what large melons require).

My fall tomato plants are in molasses feed tubs and I water them daily.

It's been a really productive and worthwhile garden season so far, but I am not inclined to spend as much time and money watering it all this summer as I have the last two summers.

Do y'all remember what it was like when it rained in July and August? It seems like the memories of nice, wet (or, at least, occasionally wet) summers are fading. I remember that 2004 was really nice, and 2007 was nice once the floodwaters receded. There was one year that we got 5" of rain in one day in August. In recent years, we're lucky if we get 5" of rain in one summer.

I'm going to link the 4" available plant water map that tracks available soil moisture in the 4" root zones of plants. Any number less than 0.50 indicates not enough moisture is available. I don't even remember the last time our number was above 0.50. Maybe back in May?

Not only is my ground cracked, Larry, but the grass clipping mulch which is very dry has baked down into a little layer of dried grass that also is cracked. It looks pathetic.

Because I've been canning lots of pickles, peppers and tomatoes, and have been processing tons of corn, the deer come every night to the compost piles to scavenge for whatever they can find. They're looking so skinny. I feel sorry for them.

Here is a link that might be useful: 4

It's dry here too. Our last rain was 3 weeks ago yesterday. We dug potatoes yesterday and since the potatoes had the thickest layer of leaves ever, because we kept piling them on to protect from frosts all through April til May 3, we didn't water after the last rain. The dirt underneath was dry for a foot down and the dirt came out in clods as big as footballs in places. But with 4 50 ft rows we got plenty of potatoes.

Our corn hasn't come off yet. The early corn usually is ready by July 4th but it went in late this year. So we're watering 8 50 ft rows at a time with 4 soaker hoses. Then tomorrow 7 rows of corn and one of sweet potatoes. We also have 4 rows of meal corn that went in where the broccoli came out and I want that to make as the last two years we got zip. Then there are all the perrenials, figs, grapes, guavas strawberries and orchard fruit. If we have to sacrifice part of the late garden to keep that stuff going we will. Can't let those plants die.

Dorothy, I just finished harvesting the last ears from the fifth corn variety. I'm glad the corn is done because I wouldn't want to have to keep watering it in this hot weather. All 5 varieties produced really well, and the raccoons didn't get a single ear, which is really odd---almost unheard of---but I am not complaining. We've had lots of corn to eat fresh and have filled up a large portion of the largest deep freeze with corn-on-the-cob to enjoy over the next few months. It was a much better corn year here this year than the last two years, thanks in large part to the heavy rainfall we got during the last two weeks in May. Without that rainfall, I don't think our corn would have produced.

I still haven't dug the last variety of potatoes. I thought they'd be ready to dig by Independence Day, but they weren't. They still were lush and green. They look considerably worse now, with grasshoppers and spider mites hitting the foliage, but still are green. I may dig them one day this week anyway. I have had grass clipping/leaf mold mulch a foot thick on top of them for the last couple of months and haven't watered them but once or twice, so not sure what I'll find when I do dig them. I expect the ground will be hard though.

I do water the perennials to keep them going, and that keeps some of the annuals planted near them going as well. This year I planted cool-season annuals in the veggie beds I didn't intend to water, and planted the warm-season annuals in areas, like the pepper beds, that I did intend to water. So, when I water the veggies I intend to keep going, I'll be keeping some flowers alive too. The only cool-season flowers still alive are sweet alyssum, violas and nasturtiums, and with this heat and the fact they are in non-irrigated beds, I don't think they'll make it much longer.

It is getting dangerously dry here now....the kind of dry where a spark from a mower hitting a rock, the hot rubber thrown off a tire when a vehicle has a blowout on the interstate or a tractor/bailer issue can cause grass or a hay field to ignite. It isn't a big everyday thing yet, but we definitely are seeing more grass fires occurring each week. It is likely we'll start getting busier and busier, so I'm trying to can everything the same day I harvest it so I don't fall behind.

Right now, our back pasture is so dry that it hurts to look at it. I am getting ready to mow it down as low as possible in order to stop any possible wildfire that would come our way from the large, cedar-filled pasture adjacent to our property. I've just been waiting for the green milkweed to set seed, and now that this has occurred, I intend to get out early in the morning and mow it down.

I am so disappointed that we are having another droughty summer. I didn't expect a really wet summer, but was hoping it wouldn't dry out as fast as it did. Back at the beginning of June our Keetch-Byram Drought Index number was incredibly low---near zero, in fact. Now, roughly 5 weeks later, it is over 350. For us, in a normal year (whatever normal is any more, who knows?), a KBDI near 400 would be more common at the end of August or early September. In a bad year it can be in the 500s or higher by early September, and that's the track we're on now unless some significant rainfall occurs. I'm not really expecting significant rainfall.

We did have a tiny shower one morning last week and it gave us 0.21" of rainfall, which wasn't much, but was better than nothing at all.

I'm scaling back my plans for a fall garden. I likely will start some cool-season seeds indoors for transplants this week for the fall garden, but then, if we don't get some half-decent rainfall in July, I likely won't transplant them into the ground. It is hard enough to establish cool-season plants in August in a normal year. In a drought year, it is almost impossible.

There's always a silver lining somewhere.....I guess this year's silver lining is that the prickly pear cactus look really happy, and the zinnias (which do get watered since they are next to the peppers) look very happy, although with the zinnias, they only look happy because they are getting water.

It took me three hours this morning just to harvest from the back garden, and I didn't even make it to the front garden. Both were watered, in part, two or three days ago and those parts look good. The parts that weren't watered don't look very good at all, but there's only so much I am willing to water.

I'll spend the rest of today canning salsa and pickles, and then either this evening or early tomorrow, I'll harvest from the front garden, and either do more canning tonight or tomorrow. After this week, I'll likely have done all the canning I'm going to do. The pickling cucumbers have been doing great, but I can see the plants aren't looking as good now as they did even a week ago. You can tell the heat stress and summer pests are really starting to affect them.

It is ridiculously hot and humid this week. Part of NE and E OK have heat advisories and excessive heat warnings. Seems like a good time to stay inside as much as humanly possible.

We just put up the shade cloth over the hot peppers today, and may put one up over the main tomato tomorrow. The shade cloth helps, but when rain isn't falling, it does not necessarily help enough.

Dawn

It's been dry here, but it's getting really bad. We're about to go into stage 4 water restrictions, which means no outside watering at all and they've been talking about turning off the water at certain times for different parts of the city. We're at one day a week right now and that already has my garden looking terrible. It was okay when it was raining about once a week (not as much as most of you were getting, but every little bit helps), but now it's not even doing that. I'm going to try to keep watering at least once a week using buckets if nothing else, but I'm about to give up on my tomatoes. I may keep Heidi because it's been setting fruit even with the high temperatures, but the rest aren't doing much anyway.

Here's a video that Oklahoma News Report did the other day on Southwest Oklahoma. It's pretty informative, but I'm not going to talk about it much because you guys do not want to hear my rant about local farmers or the city administration. I'd be wary of them trying to steal my water if I were you, though.

Leslie

Here is a link that might be useful: Lake Altus Lugert

Leslie, I am so sorry to hear how dry it is there. I have been trying for the past two years to talk myself into having a well drilled. Post like yours makes me want a well even more.

There have been a lot of people here in town drilling wells. I drove by one being drilled on the way to work earlier. Most of them have poor quality water, but they can water their yards with them at least. They're all drilling really shallow wells, so there's been a lot of discussion about how long they'll last.

Leslie

The water is not good here either, it stains everything a rusty color. Most wells are in the 100' range. My old well, about 1/2 mile from here is 60' and has water running over the top. The last time I checked the dug well the water was about 12' down, and it is less than 50' from the artesian well. It is drier on this side of the valley.

My well is 200 feet plus but to get ample water dairy farmer neighbors went down over 400 feet. I don't want sulfur water so I am putting up with not having all the water I want. Is the rust coming from the pipes or the ground water?

The rust from the wells around here must come from iron or copper in the earth. All the pipes are plastic.

When I built my pole barn a few years ago I used nearly all deck screws to construct it. I used a magnet about 18" long to go around after it was finished and got a lot of what looked like magnetic rocks. (I was looking for nails and screws to keep them out of the mower tires) They were about the size of a BB and would stick to the magnet. My soil test shows high P,K Iron and zinc. Nearly everyone around here uses some type of filter.

From 50 to 100 years ago there were a lot of coal mines in this area, I expect we have a lot of sulfur also.

Leslie,

Your water situation there sounds pretty desperate. I'm sorry your garden is suffering so much. It is discouraging to have this happen every summer.

I look at my poor miserable garden and wonder how much longer it even makes sense to water, but I'll do it for a while longer so I can get a harvest from some crops that still are in pretty good shape. If we had water restrictions here like y'all have there, I'd probably try to keep one or two tomato plants alive just so we could have fresh tomatoes, but I'd let the rest of it go. There's a point where watering costs so much that it doesn't make sense to do it.

When they talk about using water from eastern or southeastern OK, I assume they mean that they want to build a pipeline to carry the water from the eastern part of OK to the western part of OK. I think,ultimately, when it comes down to funding an enormously expensive project like that, the legislature just won't do it. They built some pipelines like that in Texas when we lived there in order to pipe water from eastern Texas to reservoirs that serve the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area and those pipelines are incredibly expensive and it takes a long time to design them, obtain the use of the land by eminent domain, and then get the pipelines built. If they decided now to build water pipelines like that in OK and the legislature funded it, it still would be at least a decade before the water was flowing from eastern to western OK. I bet it never happens.

So where does that leave everybody in southwestern OK? In a perpetual water crisis, I guess.

It used to be fairly easy to drill a well here in our part of Love County and hit water without going too terribly deep. The last person who built a home near us had the area's most experienced (and I think he is the best) water well driller try to drill them a well, and he drilled and drilled and drilled and couldn't even find water. Thousands of dollars later, with no water well, they gave up. People near us who have wells have seen the wells dry up in recent droughts, or they have had to have them drilled much deeper than before. I think our water table obviously has dropped a lot in the last decade and drilling a water well isn't the quick and easy solution it once was.

Our water co-op has wells that provide very good water and I do appreciate having high-quality water. However, when they have to drill a new well, it is an incredibly expensive process that a small, rural water co-op really cannot afford to do very often. Our last two wells, I think, were drilled only because the co-op was able to get government grants that paid a large portion of the expense.

I've always found it fascinating that farmers in places like West Texas and southwestern OK grow irrigated cotton in a region with such brutal, hot summer weather where summer drought is normal. Perhaps, with climate change bringing more erratic weather and seemingly more frequent droughts, the farmers need to rethink their strategy and find a crop that gets by on less irrigation. I hate to say that, but we are getting to the point where the water shortages are a perpetual problem every year instead of just being an occasional problem in a really dry year.

Larry, Wells are nice, but the folks that have them here mostly use them just to irrigate their yard, garden or fields of crops. A lot of them remain members of the water co-op so that they have a back-up source when the wells run dry.

You surely can tell who has a well when you drive up the road because they are the only ones with green grass.

I need to get off this computer and go do yesterday's canning. Before I even got started we had a very serious house fire, and then we had a grass fire elsewhere while we were out at the house fire. I think our fire season is fixing to explode here. After I do yesterday's canning, I'll try to do today's. I'll likely be through canning by the end of the week, one way or another. Once the fires become a regular occurrence, I don't have the time to water the garden, harvest or can, and it is so hot now that I question how much longer I can water enough to make a difference.

It hit 105 on our Min-Max thermometer at the house yesterday (It showed 109 on the thermometer on our fire vehicle that was parked at least 80 feet from the house fire) and when we finally got home I tried to run outside for a few minutes to water the container plants with a water hose, and even the zinnias and okra had leaf roll from heat and drought stress. It already is 100 degrees here at our house today and the wind is blowing just enough to add some misery to what the plants are experiencing.

I hate summer weather. It sure makes me miss the spring weather and look forward to the fall weather.

Dawn