How is your pecan tree looking lately?

Dawn, I've been keeping my eyes glued between the radar and the mesonet rain gauge for you. I couldn't believe all those rain clouds and such a small amount of rain. But it looks like it should be steady for a while, and then with the additional storms, you should be good for a week or two :) I hope your ponds fill to the brim.

Have a wonderful, rainy day!!!

Lisa

Hooray!

We have been having light rain, off and on, since daylight. Nice, cool, it's 67 degrees right now at 1:30 in the afternoon. --Ilene

Scott,

The pecan tree looks great. No scab. No weevils. No webworms. I've watered it some, but don't know if it was enough to help the nuts fill out, so maybe this week's rain will help. How are your trees? Did you get them sprayed for weevils????

Lisa,

I know. To look at the radar, you'd think we would be taking a severe pounding, wouldn't you? Still, it has rained ALL day long without stopping, and we're now up to 0.88", so I cannot complain. My DH just sent me a text message saying that southern OK is forecast to get 8.8" of rain. He's been in Hurricane Evacuation meetings all day at D-FW Airport (it is a huge hub for medical air evacuations and he's just about working 24/7 for the next 6 days) so I assume the 8.8" includes everything expected to fall between now and the end of Ike. We ARE under a flash flood watch, so I guess that expected 8.8" is the reason why. Our house sits high and dry, so I am not worried.

Ilene,

I think our temperature has held pretty steady around 70 degrees today at our house. It's been a delightful change and makes me feel like fall is here. I think it is supposed to warm up a little here tomorrow, so we'll probably be very humid. (I welcome the humidity since it is accompanying rain!)

Hope y'all get some rain. It is streaming up nonstop out of Texas but I think it is supposed to taper off after midnight.

Dawn

Dawn - I am so glad you are getting rain. I don't think Grove had any today, at least nothing looked wet. We left at 6AM and returned at 10PM and had rain in both Tulsa and Oklahoma City as we traveled. I don't mind driving in the dark OR the rain, but I hate driving in the rain IN the dark, because of all of the reflections. DH had driven all day so, I drove from Tulsa home and I was glad to finally drive out of the rain. Hope it revives your property.

Glad you are finally getting some rain now Dawn. We don't need any here and the professional weather guesser this morning is saying as much as 7" by the time Ike comes through.

I'm starting the annual migration of plants to the greenhouse today. Way to early, but don't want to expose my plants to the downpours that are coming.

randy

Well, so far our total rainfall is 1.4" so I'm pretty happy. although another 6" or 8" would make me quite a bit happier. Everything looks pretty nice today, or at least it looks better than it has most of the summer.

Carol, Sounds like y'all had a long day on the road.

Randy, I really hate to hear that you are already moving stuff back inside, but I don't blame you for doing it. IF the professional guessers are right, we're going to have rain one way or another, whether it comes from Lowell, Ike or the cold front.

I'm not convinced it will come from Ike, though. I have been following Ike and its' peculiar development (continual widening but not much strengthening of sustained winds) and think it will be the kind of storm that causes MASSIVE storm surge damage but am not convinced it will bring wicked rain and wind this far inland.

Maybe I am just skeptical about Ike because it "sounds too good to be true" that our area, with its' severe rainfall deficit, could luck into a couple of days of heavy rain. Sometimes I think heavy rain isn't ever going to fall here again.

I just want rain. I don't care where it comes from or how hard it falls, I just hope it falls here and helps revive what's left of our plants.

The Red River has substantially more water in it today. Some of y'all in southwestern to central OK ought to be getting rain today....it is staying west of Love County as it cuts across the state.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Dr.Masters' Blog

It looks like Ike will be a little more to the east of us than previously thought, so I think the rain totals will be lower. Plus it will be moving fast. Maybe you will still get a couple of inches, Dawn. It is really depressing looking out at dry ponds. Like I've said before, that memory from childhood made me pick the eastern part of the state to live.

Dawn, I think your pecan tree is just about past the time of needing water for filling the nuts, but it depends on the maturity date for your specific tree. If you pick off a nut and cut straight through the middle (like a jalapeno slice), you may be able to tell how they will end up doing. Look for air pockets in the "dough" kernel.

About 30% of our crop was lost (thus far) due to various diseases and insects, but this is not all that unusual for natives in wet years. It still will be a fair to good year. Probably one more weevil spray to go, unfortunately.

Hi Scott,

Well, if the squirrels are an indication (grrrr! They're just large rodents with cute fluffy tails!), the nuts must be worth having? The squirrels are in the tree daily collecting nuts. Then they chew through some of them, green husk and all.....are they nuts? (pun intended) Why don't the squirrels wait for the nuts to mature? Judging from the half-chewed ones the squirrels are dropping to the ground, I think they look pretty filled out.

The first 6 or 7 years we lived here, we hardly EVER had any squirrels bother anything. The last couple of years, though, we've had gazillions of them. The only difference I can think of is that Sheila, our Australian Shepherd who HATES squirrels and used to chase them endlessly, is now deaf and half-blind so the squirrels don't have her harassing them anymore.

I bet the rain misses us almost completely, and I've been feeling like that for a couple of days now. As the professional weather talking heads yammer on and on about heavy rains and flooding here because of Ike, I shake my head and say "Oh, no it isn't! Not here!" I tend to think you and I are right and they are wrong. The more the storm trends eastward near the coast, the more I see our chances of rain dwindling quickly.

Having said that, I still think the Texas Gulf Coast is in for a really awful time.....and I woldn't want the rainfall or surge they're about to get.

I was thinking about all the gardeners in the path of Ike. Just imagine how devastated their gardens, landscapes & agricultural/horticultural enterprises will be!

Dawn

The problem with those squirrels is that they will test as many pecans as they can looking for the first ones that have turned to dough (shell has hardened). They discard any that have not it seems. By now all of yours are likely edible so I guess they are just wasteful squirrels. The key to keeping them away is not having any other trees that provide direct access to your tree via branches. You want them to have to go up the trunk, and then you have options (such as a dog parked at the bottom).

Well, maybe we can remove a couple of trees from the edge of the woods before next year, because the squirrels jump from those trees to the pecan tree. I do have a cat who chases them all day long! She also chases armadillos around the yard when she sees them, but doesn't know what to do with the dillo, so just follows it around.

Dawn

Dawn, you need a shotgun! Tastes like chicken.

Now the storm center is predicted to cross over a larger piece of Oklahoma instead of the Texarkana aree, so maybe we will get some heavy rains after all. I'm OK with anything under two inches. Any more and we may get some flooding here.

Scott,

I'm not much of a hunter.....and I don't like eating game either, so guess we'll let the little squirrels live.

Today, our first band of Ike-related rain arrived around 10 a.m. and we've had several since. So far only very, very light rain and not a lot of it. Variable winds, but nothing strong at all, as of 3 p.m. I don't think our rain will amount to much at all....maybe an inch or two. I'd like more, but am just happy to have any at all.

Dawn

Glad you got some more Dawn. We got very little rain for which I am pleased.

Just my large tropicals in containers left on the back porch that come into the house and a few miscellaneous things that will end up in the greenhouse. Think this is the earliest I've ever put things back into the greenhouse and for the most part glad it's done.

I don't care for tree rats. But don't mind some of the volunteer oak and pecan that show up here and there.

randy

Randy,

Hi! Glad the rain mostly missed you. I can't believe how many plants you got moved inside already! I'd be glad it was all done too, though. Better to have it done now than to have to race to beat an early frost or a brutal rainstorm.

I like the volunteer oak and pecan trees too! One of my favorite red oaks, which now stands about as tall as our two story house, was apparently planted by a squirrel. It just appeared out of nowhere in a flower bed about our 3rd year here, and has grown amazingly fast. If I had planted it, I might have planted it further away from the house (it's about 3' from the side porch), but it does shade the south side of the house, so I'm glad it is there.

We've had about 3" of rain this month, so as you can imagine, I am greatly relieved. We still have a long way to go to make up for the rainfall deficits of the past year, but at least we have some soil moisture again.

I'm not sure when the creeks will get to a decent level again, and the ponds (still empty) won't be full again for months, if then, but we've made it through the worst summer drought since '05, so I guess I can stop worrying now.

Dawn