Hi Dorothy,

Yes, we got rain! Beautiful, glorious, heavenly rain. Lots of rain. Well, maybe not a lot compared to what y'all get up there in eastern and northeastern OK, but a lot for us. Two inches! I know 2" doesn't sound like a whole lot, but after having only 14" all year, getting 2" in one weekend is huge.

I planned for this rain to fall since the forecasters seemed so very certain it would, and overseeded the lawn areas around the house and barn with rye grass seed 5 days before the expected rain. The ground was so dry that I was worried the grass seed wouldn't sprout even though I was watering daily. Sure enough, the grass seed seemed very slow to sprout even though I diligently watered every morning and every evening.

Once the rain started falling, the rye grass started sprouting like mad and today, if the grass is dry enough, I need to mow that young rye grass as well as what remains of the bermuda grass.

I've lived here long enough to know that 2" only barely puts a dent in the drought, but we'll enjoy the moisture and nice humidity (not too much, not too little) while it lasts.

And, in case you're wondering how much of a reprieve we got from the grass, brush and wildfires.....we had a fire call on Sunday while it was raining, and then a grass fire in town in Marietta yesterday when a tree limb fell and knocked a power line down onto grass that promptly ignited. So, while the rain is so very welcome and I do expect we'll having fewer fires, it won't put a stop to them. It might reduce their intensity and it probably will mean we have fewer of them. I certainly hope so.

Right now it is mud city here, though, and I couldn't be happier. As soon as the mud dries a little, I'm going to try to clean out a couple of the beds in the garden and plant some collard greens and spinach.

I hope everyone who needed rain got some. I know that Durant got almost an inch-and-a-half after going 137 days with no daily rainfall of 1/4" or greater and we were so happy for the folks over there.

Dawn

Got 1/4" down here. Glad some folks got some much needed rain. Still just a drop in the bucket from what is needed.

We got almost 3/8". We have not been near as dry as a lot of you, but it has been very dry. The stock ponds are very low but will be OK if we get enough rain this winter.

Good for you, Dawn! I just checked our gauge here in OKC (The Village) this morning and since Friday, we had over 5.5 inches. It is soggy out there!

Busyone,

I was hoping y'all had received more rain from this round of storms.

Did you plant anything for winter....wheat or rye or anything? In addition to overseeding lawn areas with rye grass, I planted a forage crop for the deer.

A lot of the farmers/ranchers here had plowed their fields in late August or early September in preparation for winter wheat (or clover, hairy vetch or rye) planting, but then almost no rain fell in vast parts of the county in Sept. Some of them were holding their seed and waiting to sow seed just before the autumn rains fell....if they fell. I don't know how many got seed in the ground before this rain fall but I am sure some of them did. By the time the start of the rainfall was a day or so away, our local mets were saying that we were pretty much guaranteed to get rain from the approaching storms, so I am hoping everyone got their winter wheat into the ground right then.

Now that my rye and forage crops are sprouted and growing, I am hoping for some rain on a fairly regular basis to keep them watered enough to grow because I am not going to heavily irrigate all winter long like I did all summer long.

I do see plenty of winter weeds beginning to sprout now that we've had some moisture. At least the winter weeds will give the deer and cottontail rabbies a little bit of something to munch on this fall and winter. I usually don't get terribly excited about the sprouting of winter weeds, but this year it is good to see any green in the sea of tan/wheat-colored pasture grasses.

Dawn

Dawn, i have one garden with some rye about 4-6 in tall. The other garden needs planted,Just hav'nt had time.I need to get some nitrogen on it this evening.

I got my soil test results for the garden and everything looked good except for the nitrogen. And besides needing massive amounts of organic matter.

Of course i have had to water the rye a little along the way.

I did put out some winter wheat,forage turnips, winter peas earlier, but it was a total waste of time and money. What did sprout, dried up or the grasshoppers ate.

I've put an application in for a job. This store is just not doing anything. So if i get the job and can keep it, i'll have to shut the store down and possibly the greenhouse and most of the gardening. I should know something next week.

Folks are always telling me that they are glad that i have this store, but sales are tellimg me something different.

Ok, busy1, I'll bite. What kind of store, and where???

Moni in OKC

Robert, I hate to hear the bad news about the store. I just think that with the current economic environment, many retailers are having a hard time surviving because folks have less money to spend. About the only businesses doing really well here in our area are the casinos and the cattle auction barns. The cattle auction barn across the river from us in Gainesville is doing a booming business and is having to stay open very late to finish up each sale. Although that is great for whoever owns the auction, it is a bad sign that so many folks continue to sell off their livestock. If I lived anywhere remotely close to your store, I'd be a regular customer for sure. I hope you get the job you applied for, but I cannot imagine you without the store.

I was afraid the grasshoppers might get the forage crops, so I waited as late as I could to plant them. So far, so good. We still have some hoppers around, but not the vast hordes of them that we had in the hotter summer months.

I add tons of organic matter every year and still feel like there's never enough of it. The organic matter decomposes and breaks down so quickly in our hot weather that I guess I'll never get "ahead" and always will be working hard to get more, more, more of it into the garden soil. Still, all of our soil is much improved from what it was like when we moved here in 1999. It is just that some areas are a lot more improved than others.

We have a couple of armadillos plowing up the lawn and flower beds every night. I'd get mad at them, but I know they are just struggling to survive like every other wild thing. So, instead, I go out every morning, take a little compost from the compost pile with a long-handled trowel (the snakes are still out, so I have to be careful), drop the compost into the dillo holes and kick the dug up soil and clumps of grass back into the dillo holes. Then I turn on the hose and hit the hole just for a second to pack down the soil around the rye grass roots. I try to think of it as an "opportunity" to get the soil aerated by the armadillos and to have a chance to add a little organic matter to the soil. One of my favorite things about overseeding lawn grass with rye is that the constant mowing of the lawn all winter puts a lot of organic matter on the ground where it can break down at its own pace.

We've been feeding and watering the deer and other wild critters for months, and how are the deer repaying us for our kindness? By sneaking into the flower beds around the house and eating the hollyhocks and Malva sylvestris as soon as new plants sprout and make enough new growth to eat. Some years they don't bother the hollyhocks in the front flower bed at all, but this year they are. Next week I may clean out the border inside the fenced veggie garden and move the remaining hollyhocks and malva into it. I'm just waiting for the muddy clay to dry up a little more.

The forage plot I planted for the wild animals is fenced temporarily to give the plants a chance to establish and root in well. Once the plants look like they can survive being browsed, I'll remove the fencing.

Other than watering rye grass and mowing it, I'm mostly focusing on garden clean-up chores that need to be done. Once the governor removes our county's burn ban next Tues., we may get busier again, although I'm hoping we will get a brief reprieve since the recent rainfall has caused some greenup in some areas. In other areas, though, everything that already was dry and dormant is still dry and dormant.

Our autumn color is exceedingly poor but many trees, especially the larger ones, survived the drought so far with a lot less damage than I expected. We're in low-lying bottomland though, and up on higher ground, especially with rocky ridges, the trees have suffered a lot more.

We do have wildflowers and some garden flowers in bloom, so at least there is that!

Dawn