I thought I might plant a little lettuce, turnips, radishes and greens today. It will be a very small amount.

I still have okra, summer peas, winter squash, peppers, yardlong beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, peanuts and sweet potatoes producing, but nothing to write home about.

Yes its still dry here, I will have to water more. I have had to use quite a bit of water on my trees and shrubs.

I'm getting sort of geared up for fall! Just noticed some of my sweet peppers finally set fruit this weekend. In fact, one of the plants was a little blackened from the cold. Pumpkins, cantaloupe and zucchinis are flowering, as are the valiant cherry and roma tomatoes. Don't know if they will have time to do anything. I need to plant some lettuce and radish. Thinking of starting some ornamental kale from seed - I even have some from last fall that the plants are still vigorous and healthy because I cut the flower spikes and they just kept on going. They are huge!

Robert, I am sorry your fall garden didn't work out. I made it easy on myself by not even attempting a fall garden, although I very much wanted to plant one. I can't stand to walk by the fall gardening seed display racks in the store. I stand and look at the seeds and think about the garden I could have growing right now if only rain would fall.

We are still dry---at about 14" of rainfall for the entire year, and even the clay is turning to dust. Out in the pastures, if you touch the dried grasses, they crumble and turn to dust too. I'm beginning to think that without significant rainfall, we'll be living in a very dusty environment by winter.

Today we had a pasture fire very close to us caused by someone baling very dry hay (an unwise choice, I think, given that the humidity was only 14%). It was paged out as a baler fire, but when we got there, neither the tractor nor the baler was on fire, but the whole hayfield was afire. It was roughly 100 yards from our back property line. Walking through unburned portions of the pasture, I noticed that the quality of the pasture grasses still standing was very poor---thin, sparse, lots of bare ground where usually there is very thick growth. I suppose they are baling it out of desperation....even poor quality hay is presumably better than no hay.

We are at the point now that any spark sets something ablaze. I want to overseed the lawn around the house with rye grass, and now is the time to be doing it, but don't know if I can water it enough to make it germinate and grow. I'd love to have lovely green grass around the house all winter, since we didn't have much green to enjoy this summer.

I did see some purple-flowered horsenettle blooming in the gravel parking lot at the fire station today. It looked really pretty. It is the only purple horse nettle I've seen blooming in months, and I assume it must be getting a bit of water whenever we refill the firetrucks there on that side of the building. You know it is a bad year when I'm excited to see a weedy plant in bloom!

Larry, I have watered like mad and cannot even keep the bermuda grass green. That's pretty sad, isn' it. The trees and shrubs have been getting a deep soaking every couple of weeks with soaker hoses, so most of them are in pretty decent condition.

Mia, Glad you have so much going on there! I have had ornamental kale last a surprisingly long time some years too. I think it is a much tougher plant than most of us think it is.

And, y'all, today I had a new experience. I was outside around 8 a.m. putting out bird seed for the doves and cardinals and was chased back indoors by an insane skunk. We handled it the way you would handle any skunk out in broad daylight. I spent much of the rest of the day indoors just in case it has siblings or children that are hanging around. The bad thing about trying to have some green plants around during a drought is that they attract tons of wildlife, and not all of it is the kind of wildlife you want to see.

Dawn