Kimmsr: to answer your questions... What is the drainage like in that area? very good What does the soil feel like? just like peat for now but in the summer it will be hard as a rock. How well does that soil hold together and fall apart? right now it is too fluffy to hold together. It looks to be fertile soil and of excellent quality but looks can deceiving. What does the soil smell like? The soil smells mossy. How many earthworms do you see there? The earthworms are staying towards the more clay-type soil in the garden. I didn't see any at all. Also...I am waiting for my soil test to come back. We're so sure that we needed lime on the front (full sun) yard that we've already done that area. This area is just on the front side of the house. I took samples from different areas so it should be a good representation of the entire lawn. (I hope). The front yard has been uncared for for many years. There are issues of soil compaction. We've thatched and will be aerating there. This particular area looks like the link to the Moss Acres website that's previously listed. Going towards summer and drier conditions, it will not. I'm thinking of layering this area to change the composition of the soil and try to get it to remain loose this year. I should be able to plant some hosta and few other things in there while allowing the rest of the bed to do it's thing. Thanks for all your thoughts and advice~~ :) Sorry, this post got pretty long in a hurry!!

What it comes down to is all this blather about how this soil benefits what is growing in it. The water in the well tells a great story....its being poisoned by something....and the farmer doesn't know what it is. You can guess until the cows come home about how much is too much, how much of this benefits the quality of the compost or is what is being added not a benefit at all, its a hindrance to what is being tried to grow. Without a proper, and widespread soil test, the farmer is guessing....farmers' don't usually guess...its their livelihood to know what they are putting on their fields. Aspen is widely used as a bedding material...its usual name might be "excelsior"....not much good for anything else. Is such waste good for composting....I've looked, cant find any definitive answer. So the use of it as an addition to any compost is of unknown quality. So the water in the well is bad...so what's the farmer doing about it....evidently nothing. To suggest that a raised bed can be benefited by the adding of raw horse manure for vegetables.....well, you gotta take that with a grain of salt.....lots of salt to kill the pathogens that is giving the ingester the runs. Hopefully, diarrhea is the least of anybody's problems of eating such vegetable from such addition. Personally...I don't believe a person would do such a thing....but then, who's to say what strange behaviour is the norm in the family. The farmer needs to have somebody with expertise of land management come in and tell him what is wrong and how to fix it.....if it ever can be fixed in time before the children come to grief. A half acre is not that big a piece of land that, with proper care, couldn't be brought back to goodness of its soil. To suggest that just because such compost is being layered 1/3" to 1/2" over a span of 5 years is doing something FOR the soil--with that kind of compost and possibly as well, not finished, is also GUESSING about its quality. I rate it as of poor quality....very poor quality and the future, it seems, will not be any different.

Dawn, I too often wonder how our ancestors made it. My kids were the first of our family's generation to have been born in Oklahoma, but my husband's parents were born here and raised their families here. His mother told me stories about how hard life was. She said when a grass fire got started, all you could really do was just stand there and watch it consume everything in its path. With only a well to draw water from, all they could do was dig trenches and try to beat it down with gunny sacks. They lost everything they had many times, to fire and flood. Miraculously, they were never hit by a tornado. Can you imagine how discouraging it must've been to live like that? Some of the pictures I have of my husband's grandparents show the entire family all lined up in front of a little wood shanty. DH's grandfather died of gangrene after having a leg accidentally cut off in a farming accident, leaving his grandmother with nine children. The eldest was DH's dad, who was about 18, and the youngest was less than a year old. I remember not having air-conditioning -- or even fans! When I was little, we lived in a two storey old farmhouse not far from Humboldt, KS. We had a one-room schoolhouse about a mile away, but my siblings that went to high school rode the bus to Elsmore. When my mother would describe where we lived, she would say it was "out by Leanna". I never knew where Leanna was. Anyway, in the summer the house would get incredibly hot. We spent a lot of time on the front porch then, but there was still cooking and canning to do, and that had to be done inside. At night, we would spread "pallets" on the ground and sleep under the stars. It was OK, but I always hated it because the bugs would crawl on my ears and I was deathly afraid they were going to go inside my ears and get inside my brain! Funny what a 6-year-old will think. I would panic and start to scream and my poor mom would take me inside and put me to bed there. I remember every now and then turning the pillow over because it would be cooler on the under side. We had rain all night last night, and early, early in the morning yesterday. Last night it just poured. It thundered so hard it shook the house. It's almost 9:00 and it's still raining off and on. It's getting to the point where I don't even look to see how many inches we have, and I almost don't even want to talk about it anymore. I sure wish we could send you some of this. HWY 123 is closed now. It always floods, as the ditches aren't very deep and it's very close to the Caney River. If it keeps on like this, little Coon Creek will jump its banks and then HWY 75 will be closed, too, which will cut us off from Bartlesville. That doesn't happen very often, or for very long, though. There are a couple of other ways to get to Bartlesville from here using country roads, but they usually close off before HWY 75 does. According to Mesonet, we have 60% chance of rain for the remainder of the day and 50% chance tomorrow. I guess I won't be digging in the garden much today.

Robbie, The short answer, of course, is that yes, there is such a thing as "too much rain" but the sticky issue is just how much is too much, and it varies from plant to plant as well as the plant's stage of growth and how fast the soil drains, etc. Rarely will too much rain harm lawnturf unless the puddles are so large that the roots/stolons are underwater for a very prolonged period. Even in that case, you are likely to see yellowing and maybe fungal diseases on grass blades, but not actual death of the lawn grass. With ESTABLISHED trees and shrubs, if the soil is at all well-drained or even moderately slow-draining, long-term damage is unlikely. With perennials and annuals, too much rain can be a problem and plants that prefer well-drained soil and drier soil may indeed rot. Generally, though, if your rainy period is only a week or two, followed by a drier period, the plants won't suffer long-term harm. (Last year, with weeks and months of excess moisture, a lot of us DID lose plants,) With veggies, the effect of too-much moisture relates to the growth stage. As you correctly believe, unsprouted seeds are in the most damage, especially since they can wash away before they sprout. Carrot seeds, and other similar tiny seeds, are MOST prone to do this. Even sprouted seeds can get rot, especially if the rainfall is accompanied by cold temperatures AND if the seedlings don't have at least 3 or 4 true leaves and some well-developed roots to absorb that water. The corn should be fine. It is at the PERFECT stage for a lot of rain and will respond by growing like mad, which is terrific. The only trouble I ever have with excess moisture and corn is corn smut, and your corn is not at the stage to be affected by it, so that's a good thing, and corn smut is more likely in spring than in fall too. Well, sometimes the combination of hard wind/hard rain will cause cornstalks to lodge (fall over) but not with corn so young. If your corn were a couple of feet tall, lodging might be an issue, but it is too short at this point for rain or wind to knock it over, I think, You might check your corn roots and make sure soil hasn't washed away from that. It SHOULDN'T have, but might have if your rain fell very quickly and very hard. How many ears you get off of one corn stalk varies depending on the variety and insect pressure and how closely the stalks are planted to one another AND also depending on whether you have raccoons, deer, corn earworms or corn borers. In a perfect world, you should get two ears per stalk. With a very few varieties, you might get 3 ears, or even 4 (though rarely) although anything beyond the 2 ears usually will be very small and perhaps not large enough to bother harvesting. There are a very few old varieties (Six-Shooter is one that comes to mind) that consistently produce more than two ears per stalk. So, hope for two, expect one and be thrilled if you get three. Getting the ears to grow is not the hard part--getting the ears to survive the predators and ripen is the hard part. Pumpkins and squash, if they don't rot, love water, guzzle it like crazy and grow with wild and reckless abandon. If they are up and have true leaves, it is hard to give them to much water. These seeds also are not especially prone to rotting as long as the soil is relatively warm (above 70 or 75 degrees), which it is. Turnips and carrots like water and don't mind wet soil, so they ought to be fine, except for the issue of carrot seeds washing away, which could happen. Just watch your soil and make sure it doesn't "crust over" as it dries, because those tiny carrot seeds/sprouts have a hard time breaking through the crusty soil as they sprout. One way to prevent that (next time) is to interplant radish seeds every couple of inches in your beds of carrot seeds. The radish seeds will sprout first and will break through the soil surface, thereby paving the way for the carrot seeds. And, radishes mature fast, often in as little as three weeks, so you can harvest them and the carrots wil have plenty of space to grow. In the future, you can keep carrot seed from washing away in rain by covering the entire seedbed with cardboard, newspaper, plywood, or a thin layer of straw. If you use the cardboard, newspaper or plywood, lift it and look underneath it every morning and every evening to check for your first green sprouts. As soon as you see those first sprouts, remove the cardboard, newspaper or plywood. The covering keeps the seed in place if it rains and also prevents wind from blowing away the top soil/seed and keeps the soil from crusting over too. To me, the only hard thing about growing carrots is getting them to sprout before the seed washes away or blows away or rots (only an issue in cold soil). Turnips are easy. They'll sprout and grow and seldom wash away and seldom rot, so be patient and you should see leaves soon. The temperatures are in the perfect range for tomatoes to bloom right now. The only issue is the humidity and rain. With the larger fruited (NOT cherry, grape, currant or most plum) tomtoes, excess humidity and moisture, especially in combination with higher temperatures, can inhibit the pollen and cause it to be "sticky" or, sometimes, infertile. Just keep shaking the blooming plants, and you should see small tomatoes in 7 to 10 days. If the flowers drop and small fruits haven't formed, your plants aren't happy with either the temperatures or the humidity. In time, though, blooms will set fruit. Some of my summer tomatoes (those that survived the drought after I stopped watering) have new leaves already, and a few have blooms. We've had at least three days of 99-100% humidity, though, so I know that the blooms may not set fruit, but once the rain stops, it should happen. Dorothy can address your asparagus issues. I had it in Texas, but not here, although it (and a million other things) are on my "one of these days" list. I think the harvest window here is a little later, and perhaps a little longer, that what we had in Fort Worth. As long as you keep the GRASS out of your asparagus beds, all should be well. If grass ever infiltrates, especially bermuda grass, it is nearly impossible to reclaim the asparagus bed from the grass. I am assuming your soil drains well to moderately well. In those conditions, it would take a LOT of rain to hurt a veggie garden when the soil is warm. Excess moisture PLUS cold soil (below 55 to 60 degrees) is much more damaging than excess moisture plus warm soil. Even if you have very slow-draining clay, I don't think the recent rains are enough to hurt much of anything. The biggest issue in the next few days for many Oklahoma gardeners will be the possible appearance of moisture-loving fungal and bacterial diseases. These will mostly show themselves via leaf spots. Damping off of very new and young seedlings is a possibility too, and it is hard to prevent when rainfall is heavy. IF you have a prolonged rainy spell, like Scott, Dorothy, Ilene and a few others had in the spring, then you might see a few nutritional issues caused by the inability of root systems to take up nutrients because excess water clogs up their roots. It usually takes at least 4 straight weeks of extremely wet soil for that to even begin to be an issue though. Some of us experienced that last year, but only because the heavy rainfall occurred while the plants still had pretty small root systems. Finally, sometimes a VERY rainy period causes some physiological problems, such as cracking and splitting of tomatoes or melons. This occurs because the fruits'/veggies' flesh grows more quickly than the skin so the skin can't keep up and literally splits open. Also, with tomatoes, alternating wet-dry cycles can cause problems with calcium uptake that leads to blossom end rot of the tomatoes (and peppers and eggplants as well, though less often). So, after the rain ceases and your soil dries out, strive to keep it evenly moist, but NOT sopping wet, to reduce the incidence of BER. Did I cover everything you were wondering about? If not, let me know. And, feel free to pick our brains some more if you want. It may be too wet to be out in the garden right now (words I have NOT been able to say in months), but we can talk gardening! Dawn