I am probably in the .04 area. it may be less since I am in the potato hill area and it doesn't hold much water , although I still have some mud in the lowest areas that water does not drain out of.

Well, then, we are just about on the same boat because my county is at .03. Pitiful isn't it? I have watered the garden twice a week ever since we hit .37 so it looks decent. The yard isn't quite as nice and the front pasture is really bad. Despite record-setting rainfall in Jan-June, we are just as dry now as we usually are in early August. All that rain brought us out of drought, but we are sliding right back into it.

I was holding out for rain. We did get about 1/2" this morning it won't last very long in the heat to come. It did perk up everything. I am going to try to stay out of the afternoon heat. I hope the mornings are a bit cooler need a little time outside..

We have a little break before we get back in the hay field. So we are going to get a few things done here at home. Have several loads of gravel coming to repair the road on the southern part of the property that has a huge ditch washed out. The metal for the new equipment barn will be here Friday hopefully they will be here next week to put it up.

All of the garden centers are running great sales on plants but I refuse to plant anything in this heat. Home Depot has some of the red coreopsis that I want so bad but I am hesitant. I had an ICU bed that got morning sun only and I would put all plants bought late summer in there til next spring and transplant to the garden. I donot have one anymore. Do any of you plant nursery plants in this heat? If so do you plant in shade or put some kind of shade up to protect them from the extreme heat?

An ICU bed! What a great idea!

i definitely start plants in dappled shade or morning sun only Nothing small or weak survives, otherwise.

stockergal, I rarely buy plants at this time of the year simply because it rarely is raining and it is just so hot and dry that I think it is unfair to the plants for me to stick them out there in those conditions. When I do buy them, I put them in the shade of the pecan tree at the west end of the garden and keep them there until September. They start in pretty much full shade right beside the garden fence and then every couple of days I move them about 6" east, so they are gradually moving out into dappled shade, then morning sun/afternoon shade, and then finally almost all day sun and late day shade, and then finally full sun. It only takes 2 or 3 weeks to move them out into ever-sunnier conditions as they build a better tolerance for it, but it helps them adjust. If they've been in a nursery either indoors or under a shade cloth I don't like to put them directly out in full sun in August.

Carol, I'm glad you're getting some good rain. I hadn't watered until about 3 weeks ago, except for containers, but I'm certainly doing it now. The clay ground that was wet, mucky, mushy and the texture of pudding during all the rain is dry, cracking and has cracks up to 1" wide and several inches deep. You'd think in a year when 54+" inches of rain has fallen, I could have one simple August without cracking ground and without having to water the garden, but it isn't happening this year.

We're still getting tomatoes and have lots of peppers, but it is the muskmelons and cantaloupes that are coming on strong now....and it is about time!

Dawn

Hmmm I beg to differ. I got to be having more. It rained a .6 of an inch on Friday, and a .3 of an inch yesterday morning. Not that I am complaining... but I think, I can hold off watering for a couple more days. Then I will turn the soaker hoses back on.

I wish, everyone had gotten rain at the same time.

Moni

I looked up the Okla Mesonet site per Dawn's suggestion. That site has a lot of information. I was looking at all the information and was almost overwhelmed. That might be to much information in my hands. HA

i put a link to the site on my favorite list so I can access it easily. Like I said I may get myself in trouble with that much information. It is nice to have it all in one place.

Moni, I wish we all were having rain at the same time too. Down here we are paying for all the rain that fell in May and June by not having any. I am so disappointed. I was really hoping the rain would fall, albeit in lesser amounts, all summer long.

Stockergal, I love the Mesonet. It has tons and tons of useful info. Even though I know the soil at our mesonet station is sandy and I have clay so we're almost always drier than the mesonet station indicates, I still find the info handy. I do take it all with a grain of salt. For example, even though I am watching mesonet maps of soil temperatures in the winter/spring at planting time, I have a soil thermometer and check the soil temperature in my own garden anyway. And, as expected, the soil temperature here often varies from the soil temperature there, but often it is only a small difference.

If we miss the rain this week that's coming with the cool front I will be dragging hoses to the yard. I have been hand watering for sometime but I have not turned a sprinkler on the yard yet.

I hope we do get a break in this heat.

Stockergal, after mowing every other day for a month, the thought of watering my yard never crossed my mind.

I've been watering my fruit trees and muscadine vines but that's about it. It just takes too much water as it is. I need to move some tanks and I could fill them out of the pond and let them gravity drain. But I have been too lazy to get around to it.

It's too far to the pond to water directly, I have to pump it uphill and it takes about 400 ft. of hose. By the time the water gets from the pond to the garden it is scalding hot from the sun heating up the hoses.

I used to have a 275 gallon tote on a trailer and I pulled it with my tractor and had a pto pump to fill it out of the pond, it was just time consuming to fool with it. That was ok for just letting it drain but it sucked up too much moss and algae to use on any type of soaker or drip hose.

We are .16 I watered very deep a week ago Thurs. and went out of town. Sadly, I decided to water everything and used the sprinklers ignoring the soaker hoses. It woke up all the weeds in the paths around my beds. I have been so busy this past week, and cannot possibly use Round Up when the weeds are so high.

Dawn, I appreciate the help you gave me a few weeks ago about watering. It has saved me so much time.

Sammy

Sammy, You're welcome. I'm hoping you are enjoying retirement! I always think of you at this time of the year when my friend, Amber, who is a teacher, is getting back to the school building and getting ready for classes to start. But this year when she started going up there to work on her classroom, I said to myself "Sammy's retired! She doesn't have to do this any more." (grin)

I have watered the garden twice a week for the last 5 weeks since no rain has fallen and we're still at .03 on the map. It probably would be happier with more frequent watering, but I'm trying to water deeply and not so often.

After grass fires about a quarter-mile from our house starting burning green grass almost daily a couple of weeks ago, I finally started using the sprinkler to water the lawn grass around our house. The bermuda has greened up some, but not as much as I had hoped it would. I hate wasting water to water bermuda grass because then it just goes crazy and starts growing into the shrub beds, but I don't want it dry enough that it will burn.

Tim said the airport had cut way back on watering this summer, leaving the mulch in the shrub beds outside the terminals very dry. How dry? When idiot people toss their cigarettes into the shrub beds instead of into the ash cans, they are setting the mulch on fire and the firefighters are having to come put out the little mulch fires. I think I'd rather water a little more often than have mulch burning. I hate watering and I hate thinking about what our August water bill is going to be like, but we don't have much choice at this point. We are paying the price now for all that lovely rain that fell in May and June.

I'm hoping we'll eventually get some August rainfall so I can stop watering. It still isn't looking good for us, but August isn't even halfway over yet.

Dawn

It is much cooler this afternoon and the clouds are a nice break. We are suppose to get cooler the next two days, great!!!! I am still hoping for rain. The weatherman says our rain, if we get any, will come at night and he has it in the forcast for the next four days. I have my fingers crossed!!! Dawn, I don't think you are forcast to get any this go around, BUT, this is Oklahoma and these fronts can set up anywhere. You should cool off some, that will help. I am just not looking forward to watering the grass, but it is getting stressed.

fingers crossed that we all get a drink and cool off.

Well, yesterday they had us at a 20% chance for rain one day this week, and the QPF showed is in the 0.10" category. This morning's forecast dropped all that. Oh well.....we're paying now for spring's excess rainfall, and we'll just have to tough it out.

The stressed front yard which gets a lot of dappled shade for much of the day did perk up and green up after being watered a few times. The side and back yard lawn areas in full sun haven't greened up much.

Our thermometer currently is showing 106, and our forecast high is 103. Often we get compressional heating as a front pushes across the state so that 106 doesn't really surprise me. Last week one of our TV mets stressed we would be likely to see compressional heating this weekend and today so I was mentally prepared for it. Tomorrow should be better, and do should the next few days.

For the last couple of weeks, the temperature has been at 89 or 90 at bedtime quite consistently and at sunrise it has been 79 or 80, so we haven't been cooling off very much at night. I'm looking forward to having that pattern broken. This morning was a little cooler, and I thought that was a good sign.

Dawn

Thanks, Dawn. I have mixed feeling about retirement. I taught for 34 years, and still often feel that I need to get busy doing something. I enjoyed teaching, researching, studying, the kids, really all of teaching except for the time it took in my life.

Now I can work outside, and inside, and do so many things I have wanted to do.

Sammy

Sammy, I think you're so used to being busy, busy, busy that you just need to adjust to having more free time. : )

There's always substitute teaching or tutoring part-time if you start getting bored and find yourself climbing the walls. That would allow you to use all the skills and knowledge you developed over the course of your career. Or you could try something entirely different.

Many of our friends here in the neighborhood who have retired from their career jobs didn't like retirement much----too much time on their hands. A lot of them have found full-time or nearly full-time jobs at the WinStar Casino, and seem happy to be back in the workforce full-time. The ones who didn't go back to work got a lot more involved in either community, church or volunteer work or are actively caring for older relatives whose health is failing.

The fun thing about retirement is you can make it whatever you want it to be, so I hope you enjoy it.

Dawn

64 degrees here tonight at midnight. I would like to go stand outside just to see what it feels like but the mosquito squad would likely carry me away.

The breeze kept the mosquitoes away while I watered tonight. The other night I broke downand sprayed repellent on whn I went out. It only slowed them down a little.

It is 71 degrees here this morning so it finally cooled down overnight, though our daytime high still had hit 101 and I was losing hope the cool-down was really going to happen here. It is supposed to be significantly cooler today. Now, if we could just whip up a magic formula or spell or something that would make it rain. Ever since the rain stopped falling here, we haven't been bothered by pesky mosquitoes and I don't miss them at all.

I just looked at that map again and I don't agree. You dig down 4" here and it is dust dry.

Probably have to start feeding hay since the pastures are just brown.

I probably could dig down 4" in the garden, at least in the raised beds. I'd expect to find moisture since I've been watering deeply about once every 4 or 5 days. No matter how deeply I water, it isn't enough and dries out really quickly, but I'm just trying to keep things alive until rainfall returns.

Outside the garden? Everything, clay and sand alike, has deep cracks and is rock hard. I'd have to use a jackhammer to dig down 4". I suppose I could stick my finger, hand and arm down into one of the cracks in the ground to see if I could find any moisture, but I wouldn't dare....I've seen snakes glide down into those cracks and disappear.

July and August have been really disappointing, moisture-wise. No rain here in 5 weeks and, while I am sure we have good soil moisture a foot or more down, we don't seem to have much in the upper portion of the soil. Even the Johnson grass and crab grass are withering and turning brown....which isn't a problem, of course, and the lambs quarter leaves are all rolled up, drying out and falling off. The pigweed (sadly) still looks fine thought the foliage all wilts at mid-day and then perks up again over night. Normally we have better rainfall in August than we have had so far---we average about 2.6 or 2.7" of rain in a typical August. At our house so far this year, we've had 0.02". Of course, August isn't even halfway over yet. Since the butterflies love the heat, we have butterflies everywhere, so at least there's that.

Chris and I mowed the front pasture 2 or 3 weeks ago and it showed no new growth at all for well over a week. Now, a few grasses finally are putting up new green growth but it is pitifully thin and sparse. There's nothing wrong here that a good 2 or 3" of rain wouldn't fix, at least for a while, but there's no meaningful rain in sight, and our KBDI goes up daily. Robert, the KBDIs near you are scary-high. My garden is looking pretty pitiful and I have been watering. It's just been hard to water enough to fight the sort of heat we've been having in combination with no rainfall. I am hoping this week's little cool spell helps.

It is drier across the river in Texas than it is here, and there are some disgruntled fire chiefs in the county across from ours because their county commissioners declined to enact a burn ban at last week's meeting. Oddly (don't tell my fire chief husband), I don't think we need a burn ban (and doubt they really need one yet either) because I don't think the fires here are bad enough to merit that. I think we're months away from possibly needing a burn ban and I expect El Nino' autumn rains will ensure we don't reach that point. We are, though, quite a bit drier than we normally are in August and that could mean problems down the road until rainfall materializes in a decent amount.

Had I not been watering quite heavily the last 4 or 5 weeks, I expect my garden would be largely brown and dead. I base that on all the gardens around us that are exactly that....brown and dead. A lot of people have mowed their brown gardens down to the ground, or plowed them under. I can't do either because I have perennial herbs, veggies and flowers in my garden that I'd like to keep alive.

Between the 2+ months of incredible flooding and then the quick onset of dry conditions once rain stopped falling, it really hasn't been an very good year for gardeners in our county, though I know some folks had a great melon year or a great tomato year or a great bean year. It is just that it wasn't that great of a year for everything overall. A friend of mine has told me every day this week "I'm ready for September to get here." I understand exactly what she means and I feel the same way. I guess if September doesn't bring relief, we'll start looking ahead and hoping for October to hurry up and get here.

It was beautiful here this morning cloudy and cool. Ihave not checked our low temp for last night but this morning was very cool. We worked 96 head of new steers last night, it was better than it has been but we still had to turn on all of the fans. We got home and I just sat outside on the back porch in the cool night air. It has been so long since I could do that and not sweat.

I let the cool weather get to me this morning and laid out two new long narrow beds along the south fence in the backyard. Ok, I had to have someplace to put my transplanted daylillies. Of course they are solid bermudagrass since I am stealing lawn space. Put down thick pieces of cardboard to help kill the grass. When the grass dies out I will turn over the top couple of inches ( hard clay) and add compost and manure then plant this fall. I have some daylillies planted in my front beds that are in clay with manure on top and they have done very well. I will see how they survive the winter.

Still not a drop of rain so I will water the lawn tonight. First time this year it's hard to believe. I guess I should be happy , I suppose I'm spoiled.

The cool spell is being appreciated.