I spent most of the day reflooring a small utility trailer. It was hot to say the least. I have two containers that I get bulk cattle feed in that I'm going to leave on the trailer. I can get a ton of feed that way. I have another trailer if I need to haul anything.

It was 112 in the greenhouse so I turned the misters on to try and cool it down a few degrees. I had to move my container trees in there to keep the grasshoppers from stripping them. I did plant some lettuce ,carrots ,beans, sugar snap peas, kale, spinach in some containers also.

My muscadines are getting ripe a little early, I've picked about 6 gallon so far and they are still loaded. They didn't get very big due to the drought and heat, but it is my largest harvest so far.

I'm just doing what has to be done and nothing else if I can help it.

stockergal, I do hate the way the drought monitor reporting system seems to lag so far behind real-life conditions. I've always said that by the time the U. S. Drought Monitor is showing us only finally reaching the "Abnormally Dry" category, we're already deeply in drought. Once the Monitor shows us being "Abnormally Dry", we already are so dry that I cannot water enough (even if I irrigate a whole, whole lot) to keep the garden producing well. I can maybe keep it alive at that point with heavy watering, but I'm not keeping it in really good production....other than the really heat-tolerant things like southern peas and okra.

The Drought Monitor map posted on the NWS-Norman website last week and this week is slightly different from the U. S. Drought Monitor map, and Gary McManus mentioned a glitch last week that caused this, so it seems the glitch continues.

It is hard to explain what 8 weeks without meaningful rainfall (0.2" at our mesonet station during that time, and 0.13" at our house) can do to a county that had been heavily flooded three separate times from May through the first week in July, and it just astonishes me to see the rapid deterioration here. Tim and I walked through a pasture that still looked a little green, but the grass crunched beneath our feet as we walked. If we had been walking there in early July, we would have been walking in thick mud lying beneath a couple of inches of water. The ground has cracks as wide as 1.5" and there's almost no late summer/autumn wildflowers back there. Usually there would be a lot of liatris and goldenrod in bloom, snow-on-the-prairie, brown-eyed Susans, native sunflowers, greenthread daisies, croton and helenium. All I saw the other day when we were back there were the native sunflowers growing and blooming in my big compost pile back there, and a few helenium plants that are about 4" tall due to the lack of rain and have the smallest flowers imaginable. I did see one snow-on-the-prairie plant that was about 6" tall and had one tiny flower. It is just a pitiful wildflower showing, but not surprising given the conditions.

Even with good deep watering about once every 4th or 5th day, my zinnias look pitiful. They've been in bloom and keeping the butterflies happy, but they don't look very good. I'm about ready to call it a year and stop watering. I think I've gotten all the perennial vegetables, herbs and flowers through the worst of the heat and the 8 weeks and counting without rainfall, so I can stop all the irrigation and just focus on keeping the few plants I have in pots watered at this point. It still has been so hot that my fall tomato plants, which look great and are blooming, still are just dropping blossoms and not setting fruit. So, between the heat and the drought conditions, I don't expect a fall tomato crop. Once it finally cools down enough for fruit to set, then the first frost is likely to arrive before the fruit gets a chance to mature.

There's a part of me that doesn't want to stop watering the garden because I feel like the butterflies and bees need the blooms since so few natives are in bloom, so maybe I'll water once every couple of weeks. With cooler temperatures, that much irrigation might keep the flowers going another month or two. I like to have something in bloom in early October when the monarchs are migrating through, especially when the wildflowers in the fields aren't looking too good.

We have not cooled off down here as much as some of y'all have, so we're looking forward to next week's cooldown, if it actually arrives. I feel the same way about rainfall. They have routinely put a chance of rain in our forecast pretty often all summer long, and the rain has missed us repeatedly, so I just am not going to get my hopes up any more. When the rain has found us, on three occasions it gave us 1/100th of an inch. I hate to sound ungrateful, but that 0.01" didn't do anything for our plants. After we got the tenth of an inch a while back, plants actually greened up a bit for a couple of days, but it didn't last long with the hot August sun beating down on it.

I am grateful for the deep soil moisture we still have, even though it is pretty far down by now. It at least has kept most trees green and happy and I think it has helped the firefighters here keep grassfires controlled as well as they have. So far, none of the fires have turned into wildfires, for which we remain grateful. Usually, when our KBDI is as high as it is now (645 today), we are having awful wildfires, so we are just keeping our fingers crossed and hoping that rain gets here before the wildfire season really takes off. A few trees are looking pretty bad, notably cottonwoods, some elms, redbuds and honey locust. Apparently they resent being expected to tolerate two months without rainfall in the worst of the summer heat. I also noticed the native sumacs are beginning to wither, dry out, die, etc. That's somewhat common here in drought, but maybe a bit of a surprise considering we have ha 54" of rain this year, albeit none of it lately.

Robert, I am doing the bare minimum outdoors too. It is too hot to do anything more than what absolutely must be done.

I spend a brief period every morning making puddles of water in the gravel driveway for the butterflies so they can puddle, and filling up large, flat black feed pans with water for the cottontails and the green wading pool with water for the deer to drink. I keep wondering how it is possible that we are in such bad shape after a wet spring and early summer. The hawks and Mississippi kites are hungry and relentlessly after our chickens. Tim and I sometimes have to go outside and chase them away because they are sitting on top of the chicken coops or the fenced chicken runs or even in the fruit trees trying to get our chickens (who are aware of the situation and are hiding in underbrush or underneath the deck).

Tim and I are driving through western Love County later today. They aren't in Moderate Drought yet like our portion of the county is, but their grass fires lately have been larger and harder to control than ours, which I think likely is because they have sandier soil and are routinely drier than us most of the time anyhow since it drains more quickly. I think it will be interesting to see if they look as dry as we do, or drier or less dry. We haven't been out there in at least a month, so I expect the countryside will look quite a bit different now.

Across the river from us in Texas, the drought continues to spread from east to west and most counties between us and the D-FW metro area have burn bans as their KBDIs are in the 700s. On the Drought Monitor map I can see worse drought conditions in counties adjacent to ours that are spreading a bit more northward each week and are about to reach our county too.

In a year that started with such hope and promise of an El Nino and widespread rain, which certainly did occur, it is disappointing to have the usual July-August dryness and drought, and also disappointing to have it carry into September.

I spent a large part of the day working outside yesterday. I am grateful to live in a wetter part of the State because I have only watered my garden one time this year, and one raised bed one other time. I didn't have a good tomato year, but the problem was from my garden getting too much water and it staying for too long in the area where I chose to plant most of my tomatoes. The rainfall that falls directly on them would have been plenty, but I also have a small french drain that was emptying into that area and it just got too much. Only half of my garden gets that extra water, but that is where most of the tomatoes were this year. I am still getting lots of Sungold and some Dr Carolyn so we have had plenty to eat, but I'm going to start taking some of the other vines out. My peppers have produced well but are beginning to look a little ragged at this point. I am not going to worry about them since the sweet potato plants planted about 6 feet away are starting to take over the ground under them and the Zuchetta and Seminole squash plants are beginning to borrow the top of the pepper cages and shielding the plants from sunlight. Yesterday I reached for a pepper and there was a cucumber hanging on the cage probably five feet from the trellis the rest of the plant was climbing. It had crawled through the sweet potato vines, across a sidewalk, and up the pepper cage. I found a overripe pickling cucumber in a tomato plant yesterday and since the pickling cukes are on the side of my garden that didn't get the standing water and gets picked everyday, I'm not sure how I missed it.

I never did get all of my garden planted this year, and I have a lot of grass and weeds that has taken over the unused area so I have lots of clean-up to do. The part of the area that I did use has total ground cover and I have to carefully choose where to put my feet to work my way through. I am still picking cucumbers, but not with much interest, since I have made over 70 jars of pickles from one 18 ft cattle panel of vines. The plants look awful but I can't make myself rip them out yet. I have a few vines of slicing cukes in another area. They were planted after the sugar snaps and by the time they started producing I had just about had all of the cucumbers I wanted just from eating the pickling cucumbers.

I hope I get a good harvest from the sweet potatoes. If vines are any indication, then they should do great. I think I only planted 7 or 8 plants that I got from macmex and I am anxious to try the ones that are new to me. Mostly what I have left in the garden that I really care about are the squash and sweet potatoes. I had planned to plant a few Fall crops, but just haven't gotten it done.

Carol, It sounds like your jungle is doing really well.

I miss cucumbers all the time. If they're too big to pickle, I slice them up for the chickens and the deer.

It still is too hot and dry here for fall crops, but I might clean out a bed this weekend and then sow lettuce and other greens seeds in it if we get rain next week. If the QPF can be believed, we might get around an inch. However, the QPF has enticed us with good rainfall totals several times this summer when we were 5-7 days out, and then as the appointed rainy days approached, the QPF started dropping those totals down to almost nothing and the rain completely missed us, so I'm not getting my hopes up too high or too quickly.

Dawn

Dawn, I hope you get in on the rain this weekend or next week. We're hot. We're dry, but more of a chance to getting some rain than you are. I'm timing it, too. I've been trying to garden all day, but it's just too hot.

Looking forward to Tomorrow night and Wednesday cool down.

I have my stash of plants ready to get in the ground as soon as it cools off this week. It would be nice if I had to wait for the ground to dry. yea!!!

chickencoupe, hot hot hot

we are going like crazy trying to get the wheat in before it rains, because yes it will rain, when I have no idea. I do believe that there is no place on earth hotter than an Oklahoma wheat field, whether planting or harvesting. Yesterday afternoon my truck outside temp was 102, it felt hotter standing next to that old farm truck full of seed wheat.

it seems we are always trying to beat some kind of weather with no time to do it. I wish I knew what an 8 hr or even 10hr day was like. We would probably be lost. lol

hope everybody gets water and cooler weather this week.

I still have the hankerin' to grow my own wheat even though I know it is not cost-prohibitive. Every time I read your "wheat" I think I should put a row in.

I have the room (yay!) I just love the way it looks. However, I've never stood in a wheat field. Don't think I will now. ha

I can't remember now if we hit 100 or 101 on Sunday, but we hit 101 yesterday, and the heat index was even worse. Here in our county we had grass fires and vehicles fires, or to be more accurate, vehicle fires that then ignited the grass and caused grass fires, on both Sunday and Monday. We're ready for some rain to fall before things get much worse around here. We've had a lot of vehicle fires ignite the grass in the last 3 weeks or so...not every day, but often enough that it is abundantly clear that the grass is far too dry. Some areas here haven't had measurable rainfall in 60 days.

The QPF looks more favorable today but I still hate to get my hopes up that the rain it forecasts actually will fall because that failed to happen a lot this summer. When the QPF forecasts rain and you don't get it time after time after time, you stop believing it.

Even if an inch of rain falls here, while we'll be incredibly grateful to get it, it will be just a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed to pull us back out of drought. Still, an inch (or even a tenth of an inch) is better than nothing.

I'm looking forward to the cooler weather. It was 80 degrees here when I got up this morning and it looks like that is our overnight low....and it wasn't nearly low enough. It isn't just that the last few days have been so hot but also that they have heated up really early in the day and also not cooled off much at night.

Our chances of rain have gone up a lot too---from 50% to 70% for one day or night (I've lost track of which) so that is something that makes me feel a little more hopeful.

I've given up trying to beat the heat when it comes to the garden. I'm just trying to stay inside and stay cool.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday outside in the worst of the heat digging up dead and overgrown shrubs (some with thorns..ouch). If I had the luxury of free time I would have waited a few days for the cool down, but between working full time and taking care of a two year-old I have to take the chances for garden work when I can get them. I even planted some new perennials yesterday in the bare spots where the dead shrubs were. I know a 100 degree day is probably the worst possible time for transplanting, but I drowned them in water and am hoping they tough it out just one more day until we cool off.

I spent what time I could mowing and weed eating the last 2 days. The grass was tough as nails and it looks scraggly. I even sharpened the blades but it was too tough.

I am ready for some cooler weather but not ready for winter yet. Still lots that needs done.

Heather, As long as the plants were kept really moist, I expect they'll survive being transplanted on a 100-degree day. If they start showing signs of transplant shock in a few days, that would be par for the course, but it doesn't mean they'll die. Sometimes real life doesn't allow for a gardener to wait for perfect planting conditions to arrive.

Robert, We have avoided mowing because we're at the point where a spark from the mower hitting a rock might start a grass fire. Been there, done that before, but I did hurriedly stomp out the little grass fire before it could spread when the mower started a fire. If we get rain, though, I'll wait a couple of days for it to dry out a little and then I'll mow while the grass has some moisture in it.

Dawn

Payne county is already feeling the touch of the cool front that hit the northern parts of the state, today. While our heat index is above 90 at the Perkins mesonet station, we're into the 80's with our trees and foliage.

It's that "not cooled off much at night" that Dawn wrote that is cutthroat! Hubby is ready to hit the ground running - he especially was over the long weekend off - and I'm ready to hit the ground running with gardening, roof repairs, lot clearing of railroad ties, more sandstone boulders and much more very chest-sweating and labor-intensive work. I kept reminding him it isn't cooling off at night and without full A/C all over the house, we're in for trouble if we start working like that. We "piddle" worked all weekend while mostly remaining indoors. We've ran the soaker hose atop the house. (We have 2 A/C on one side of the house. We're fine.)

Just a few more days. On the other hand, the intense sun is an oh-so-awesome-laundry-disinfectant.

^^ Eye-balling the radar seeing storms that just might hover over southern Okalhoma.

I am afraid to look at the radar, so I just wonder outside and look at the clouds and pray for rain.

Yeah, those storms all "hover" over southern Oklahoma.

There is a small intense storm headed straight for Burneyville area. Maybe it will do more than spit on Dawn.

It spit on us a little before midnight, and rained a bit heavier today. I'm not happy with the total rainfall, but just happy to get rain at all. We're at a bit over 0.60" now in our rain gauge here at the house and light misty rain falls for a few minutes here and there, and that's more rain than we've had in the last 62 days combined, so it is hard to complain about that. We need a lot more.