Wow. Interesting. Thanks.

0.27 and 90.

.15 (except everything I watered last night and this morning :) My weather forecast says I should expect rain around 12:15 today...and that's why I water, lol

Carol

yeh, my new garden bed is pretty much toast. I need to make changes. I wasn't able to buy hay for mulch this year. I'm thinking to block off a section of the yard next year and let the grass grow for use as mulch again. And, of course, turn the beds into hugels this fall.

Mine showed 0.03 and 97 degrees, which explains why I largely hid indoors in the air conditioning all day. Can you imagine walking barefoot on ground that hot? Not that I ever walk around barefoot outdoors anyhow. I did water. I watered the garden, I watered the trees and flowers and then I watered the chickens (by letting them play in the water from the sprinkler). Our garden soil that gets watered deeply every 4th or 5th day is horribly dry 48 hours after I watered it, but I refuse to water more often. Our dround that has not been watered is dry and cracking. The widest cracks I've seen mostly vary from 1 to 1.5". Some might be a little wider. Burneyville (our OK Mesonet station) is getting rain right now and has been for a while now, but nothing has reached us here yet. So, our numbers will look better on the map tomorrow, but that will just be for part of the county. All of the county is not getting the rainfall, at least not yet.

Ugh! I hate that for you Dawn. It's almost worst (in a way) when everyone around you is getting rain and you get nothing. It feels...personal. Why not me?!

We had lots of thunder yesterday evening and a couple of very light, passing showers. It cooled off for a bit, but not enough rain to even register. Today, like yesterday is a 20% chance of precipitation. Come on, rain! I watered trees this morning just for you.

Dawn, I sure hope yours comes today, too.

Carol

Thanks, y'all. I agree it is depressing and starts feeling personal when 95% of your county gets rain and you get nothing. You wonder why you're in the wrong 5%. lol.

It is raining to our west and southwest this morning, so maybe some of that rain will work its way here today or tonight. We had everything but rain yesterday---strong winds briefly as Burneyville was getting its 3.17" of rain, heavy clouds, tons of thunder, some lightning. I swear, you could see, smell and practically feel the rain in the air, but there was no rain reaching the ground so maybe I just have an overly active imagination. Looking at the radar, I couldn't see how the rain missed us, but it did. Some other parts of the county that got rain only got a trace, though, so it wasn't a county-wide heavy rain. The heavy rain trained from Burneyville, which is about 10 miles west of Marietta towards Madill, so folks in the line of the storms got a lot and everyone else got very little.

It's August in Oklahoma, so it isn't shocking that the rain missed us---that is typical here and it is why a fall garden is so hard to get started here in August. My little fall seedlings that already are in the ground wilt at mid-day, but they are well-watered and their soil is moist, so they aren't dry. They're just reacting to the heat.

Today is our umpteenth day with a Heat Advisory and our forecast max heat index for our location is 110, so I will be hibernating inside again today, just trying to stay cool and keep the animals cool. We're lucky in plenty of ways---no watering restrictions, no power outages, etc. so it is a fairly uneventful summer. I'd just like for it to be a little more eventful, chosing rain as the event I'd like to see!

Dawn, I wonder if your location has something to do with rain missing you so much? You say you're surrounded by Texas on 3 sides, so you're on one of the little peninsula type things, by the river. Just hypothesizing that there's just enough weather/humidity/wind/air changes from your unique location to cause the storms to dodge around you, unless the storms are big enough to overcome it.

Sometimes it works in our favor, but usually they either get rain in Texas or rain in Oklahoma and it misses us both times. That happened yesterday! I don't want to blame the river, but maybe we should. However, it is my understanding that rivers do not influence the atmospheric conditions that cause rain to fall or that determine where it falls, nor do rivers influence the path taken by tornadoes. I think it is just the luck of the draw. There's been times when we have had 6-10 or even 12" of rain in one day and Burneyville didn't get any. This is why I track my own weather---because anybody's individual weather can differ greatly from what happens at their mesonet station. We call it being "in the doughnut hole", when rain falls all around us and misses us.

One year, we drove up to OKC with our rototiller to till up the ground for a GW OK Forum member's garden. I had talked with her on this forum for a couple of years but never had met her spouse. When we were introduced to him, he asked where we lived and as soon as I said we were halfway between Marietta and Thackerville, his instant response (he worked in agriculture) was "oh, you're in the dry area that never gets any rain". I was floored! How could he have known that? lol. He said it was from his years of working on a custom harvesting team and coming down here to harvest wheat---he knew exactly where we lived and exactly how often the rain seems to bypass our part of the county.

Rainfall is what it is. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't. So, at our house we are working on our 5th week with no rainfall. I water what I can, but the ground is getting so hard around the house that the clay is cracking and shifting and it is getting almost impossibly hard to lock the doors. I guess if we don't get the rain that this weekend's forecasted cold front is supposed to bring us, I'll have to water the yard deeply on all sides of the house to see if we can keep the door locks functioning. I've tried to focus the watering on the fenced garden, the containers up by the barn, and the little puddle ponds I made for the poultry to wade around in. I'm going to have to shift my focus to watering the foundation of the house if the heat and dry weather don't hurry up and give us a break.

The pastures don't look too bad in some places. The sandier soil areas look better than the clay areas. Some areas, though, really have begun to brown and dry out and look horrible. The grass fires we've been having haven't been that bad in the last 3 or 4 weeks. They were worse out west, but the rain fell out there, so they should be okay there for a while.

If we don't get rain this weekend, I won't do any more fall planting because there is no point in planting a lot of stuff I cannot keep well-watered.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that someday we will all be jealous of Dawn's soil moisture.

I almost feel guilty, but I'm too relieved. We got .25" of rain late afternoon yesterday. There's no way I can water my whole yard (1 acre) and the grass has been turning brown in spots and trees losing leaves due to heat stress and dryness. Things cooled off last night, but it is muggy, muggy, muggy this morning. Had to come in at 7:15 to change out of damp clothes.

Carol

cochise, I hope you're right and I hope that day is coming soon. I don't exactly need another rainfall like we got on April 29, 2009 (12.87") but even a couple of inches of rain would turn my frown upside down. Even the zinnias are dying a slow death due to excessive heat and too little moisture. I water as much as I reasonably can, but when you're this dry, it just isn't enough.

stockergal, I even could tolerate no rain if all we got was cool air, but rain plus cool air would be heavenly. Every August I ask myself why we live in Oklahoma, but then along comes September and October to remind me that July and August don't last forever.

Carol, I'm glad you got some rain. It really wasn't enough, but any rain is better than no rain. I feel like my laundry load has tripled over the last 4-6 weeks because everyone showers and cleans up every time they come in from working outdoors, and that sometimes means three changes of clothing per day. Whatever it takes in the summertime though, whatever it takes.

I've barely watered the yard at all, preferring to save the water for flowers, herbs and veggies, so our lawn looks awful. Usually the acre nearest the house looks the best, and it still looks a little better now than the rest of our place, but by no stretch of the imagination does it look good. It is so hot and dry now that the Johnson grass in the fields is drying out, twisting, curling, turning brown, etc. but that stuff won't die. It just goes dormant and comes back with a vengeance when rainfall returns.

Let's hang on for just a couple more days. Just a couple more days (maybe sooner for those of you further north) and we ought to see better temperatures and more widespread rainfall. Summer doesn't last forever, and we'll miss it when it is gone and we and our gardens are getting progressively colder, but right now a nice blast of cold weather sounds very appealing.

Dawn