Travis has us at 90 tomorrow. Possibly 92.

I might be sunburned at well. As long we are still sproutin;' we are OK.

HU

we re ok .

That 92 is really hot considering how far north y'all are. In Wednesday's heat the wasps really were out all over the place here, so please watch out for them. I think if some of y'all hit 92, that may be record temperatures for the date?

We're okay, but we're gonna be hot. Being hot is not necessarily bad. There are lots of ways we can survive the heat: drinking cold water, iced tea, Gatorade, etc. And then, of course, ice cream will cool down a person. Hot weather is always a nice excuse to eat ice cream.

Over the years I've noticed that very hot weather in March often is a sign of an early onset of heat coming later in the spring---the type of heat that shuts down tomato production early. Let's hope this March heat is not an omen that earlier than usual heat will strike our gardens in a more permanent way in a few weeks. Fortunately this week's heat wave peaks today and then we will cool pretty rapidly, at least back down into the range of normal March temperatures.

I hope the hot doesn’t stay! The husband is off to Lowe’s and Tractor Supply today to pick up all the big stuff we need—straw, some potting soil, mulch. We are planning to spend the weekend getting the garden finished up and getting ready for our new batch of chicks arriving in two weeks. I planted our my cherry seedlings and elderberry cuttings, so that’s something, at least.

Otherwise, the news is too grim to read much of. NY and NOLA are drowning. Hopefully gardening will help keep our spirits up. If y’all haven’t read it, there’s a book by Timothy Egan called “The Worst Hard Time,” about the people who stayed behind in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl and tried to keep living. It’s always good to keep perspective that people have lived through worse.

—Marleigh

Marleigh, I read that book a few years ago. Dawn has read it several times. My family lived in Oklahoma during that time.

94 in norman! Feels like 97.

We were only 87 today, but I went for a short hike in a place along the Buffalo River (about 1.5 hours drive one way) and took shots of wildflowers, which I'm about to download and look through. I almost melted, because this is so abruptly so warm/hot. I also lapsed into coughing twice because A) I choked on a fruit pie I was eating and B) I'm allergic to spring (sigh). I'm sure I terrified the other hikers who were sure I was coughing a pandemic around them.

93 here

Marleigh, I read that book every time we have a dry, hot summer, which generally is pretty common in my area, to remind myself that whatever drought we are having in any given year is not nearly as bad as what they went through in the Dust Bowl years. I truly love that book. I felt so much more connected to our history after I read it. My dad was a Dust Bowl baby, having been born to a poor, white, sharecropper family in 1919 in Texas just across the Red River from the western corner of the county where I live now in OK. As a child, all the kids in his family quit school after 2nd or 3rd grade in order to help their dad try to raise enough crops to feed the family. They never had a cash crop to sell because times were so hard and the rain so scarce. He didn't talk much about the hard times they endured, but opened up and spoke a little more about it after all of us kids were adults with kids of our own. In the few photos they have from the 1920s and 1930s, everyone in his family was as thin as a skeleton and looked like they barely had enough to eat to stay alive. My grandmother and aunts can and did preserve anything/everything they could (even stuff we consider weeds) because whatever meager food supplies they grew often ran out in the winter time. Back then, every jar of food in the root cellar truly mattered. A neighbor of ours who grew up on the property that abuts our western fence line used to tell me stories her mother told her about life right here in our neighborhood during the Dust Bowl, and it was horrifying what the people went through. One of the old timers here told me often about what great soil our property used to have before the Dust Bowl took it all away. I guess that is why we have such horrid red clay---it is the subsoil that was left after all the good sandy loam flew away.

Jennifer, That was too hot!!!! Our weather behaved pretty well after overachieving the day before---we only went to 90 degrees. A lot of plants wilted in the heat and sunlight, but perked off as the sun went down and the heat faded. We still awoke this morning to an overnight low that was lower than our usual high temperature for this date.

dbarron, I'm allergic to spring too. It is horrible. I'll be glad when allergy season is over, but for me that won't be for a very long time yet. Everything is pollinating like mad now. I'm glad you survived the trip.

Here's the map showing maximum temperatures yesterday:

Yesterday's Maximum Record Temperature at Mesonet Stations

Note that it hit 100 degrees in Hollis. That might not even be the earliest that Hollis has hit 100 because they often have these early hot days, but I bet folks weren't happy to see those triple digits.

Dawn

Dawn, when I lived in Chelsea OK, it hit 100F on March 1st about 10 years ago.

Dawn—My grandmother and her family left Rocky Comfort, Missouri (outside Joplin) just before the Dust Bowl, and my grandfather lived hand-to-mouth on a dirt farm in rural Nebraska with his father. My great-grandparents never had any money (my grandmother didn't have shoes until she was six), but they were able to grow enough food in the garden in California for all twelve kids to live through the Depression. I was lucky to grow up next door to my grandparents, so I absorbed much of their thrift, which lasted their entire lives. I just pulled some fabric out of my rag bag yesterday to make masks for my husband—I can't bear to throw anything away unless it is literally in tatters. And even then, it usually becomes dog bedding. ;) My mother's parents both lived through the Spanish Flu in rural Sweden—my grandfather was a blacksmith, newly married to my grandmother—it was the only part of her life in Sweden that she would ever really talk about, and it definitely stayed with her until the end. I feel fortunate to have all these stories to remind me that things that seem unendurable are survivable, and were often much worse than even what we are experiencing. And that book makes me thankful that the GIANT grasshoppers I'm already seeing are not, at the very least, coming in enormous clouds!

—Marleigh