I've been reading the High Country Gardens e-zine Xeriscape Gardening for four years. It is a good read and eyeopening. It's a free signup and they don't send it too often. For near total drought, look to the species roses. My species garden sits on a clay knoll with no irrigation. Parts are so dry that grass won't grow. The roses there survive (including one of my found boursalts). Two plants to look to are Sedums and Alliums. One of my more miserable summers, garlic chives were a riot of blooms. They fill spaces, but are easily controlled. Sedums don't seem to need water. Native plants continue to surprise me. I thought my sweet autumn clematis was dead to drought. It came back, it was just taking a year off. And I do use grey water on roses; when we replumbed the house, the grey water diversion was designed (by us) into the system. Grey water works well on roses on manetti and multiflora rootstocks. No guarantees with roses on Dr. Huey.

A statement from the NWS regarding this summer in central NJ: ...WARMEST METEOROLOGICAL SUMMER ON RECORD AT TRENTON... ...FIFTH DRIEST METEOROLOGICAL SUMMER ON RECORD AT TRENTON... ...EIGHTH WARMEST AUGUST ON RECORD AT TRENTON... ...THIRD DRIEST AUGUST ON RECORD AT TRENTON... ...MOST DAYS IN A YEAR THAT REACHED OR EXCEEDED 90 DEGREES ON RECORD AT TRENTON... METEOROLOGICAL SUMMER (JUNE, JULY AND AUGUST), 2010 IS THE WARMEST SUMMER ON RECORD WITH AN AVERAGE TEMPERATURE OF 77.67 DEGREES. THE PREVIOUS WARMEST SUMMER ON RECORD OCCURRED IN 1898, WHEN THE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE WAS 76.47 DEGREES. ALSO, METEOROLOGICAL SUMMER, 2010 IS THE FIFTH DRIEST SUMMER ON RECORD WITH 5.90 INCHES OF PRECIPITATION. THE DRIEST SUMMER ON RECORD OCCURRED IN 1966, WHEN 2.66 INCHES OF PRECIPITATION FELL. AUGUST, 2010 TIES AUGUST, 1900 FOR THE EIGHTH WARMEST AUGUST ON RECORD WITH AN AVERAGE TEMPERATURE OF 77.1 DEGREES. THE WARMEST AUGUST ON RECORD OCCURRED IN 1895, WHEN THE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE WAS 78.7 DEGREES. ALSO, AUGUST, 2010 IS THE THIRD DRIEST AUGUST ON RECORD WITH 0.80 INCHES OF PRECIPITATION. THE DRIEST AUGUST ON RECORD OCCURRED IN 1964, WHEN 0.47 INCHES OF PRECIPITATION FELL. FINALLY, THE TEMPERATURE THIS YEAR AT TRENTON HAS REACHED OR EXCEEDED 90 DEGREES ON 47 DAYS THROUGH AUGUST. THAT TIES 2010 WITH 1983 AS THE YEARS WITH THE MOST DAYS THAT HAVE REACHED OR EXCEEDED 90 DEGREES. THAT TIE WILL NOT LAST, BECAUSE THE TEMPERATURE AT TRENTON WILL EXCEED 90 DEGREES AGAIN TODAY. TEMPERATURE RECORDS DATE BACK TO 1893. PRECIPITATION RECORDS DATE BACK TO 1866. $$ THE TEN WARMEST METEOROLOGICAL SUMMERS AT TRENTON DATING BACK TO 1893: RANK TEMPERATURE YEAR (DEGREES F) 1 77.67 2010 2 76.47 1898 3 76.27 1983 4 76.07 2005 5 75.97 1895 6 75.93 1896 6 75.93 1973 8 75.90 1966 9 75.83 1899 10 75.80 1893 THE TEN DRIEST METEOROLOGICAL SUMMERS AT TRENTON DATING BACK TO 1866: RANK PRECIPITATION YEAR (INCHES) 1 2.66 1966 2 3.80 1957 3 5.48 1913 4 5.53 1874 5 5.90 2010 6 6.80 1929 7 7.02 1925 8 7.09 1976 9 7.11 1949 10 7.22 1912 THE TEN WARMEST AUGUSTS AT TRENTON DATING BACK TO 1893: RANK TEMPERATURE YEAR (DEGREES F) 1 78.7 1895 2 78.2 ...

Hi, It's great you found this friendly enabling forum!!! LOL We do enable so keep reading and enjoying the post. You will have 100 varieties by the end of next summer. Seriously! I am in Lansing, IL. I have made wonderful friendship from some of the people on this forum. Some of us are e-mail buddies and some are like sisters to me. Enjoy and come to the mini walk on July 7th...contact Connie,Westy (Carole) or Carol. Gloria

Dorothy, From watching how the jetstream, I think it has persistently come close enough to your end of Oklahoma that you get the gray, gloomy clouds on the edge of the cold fronts that are dropping snow and ice north of you. Way down here in southern OK we've had more sun than last year, but in the last week or so, the sun has become increasingly rare. Keith, You're welcome. I'm getting pretty concerned about y'all up there in central OK. This is the driest I remember seeing your part of the state in winter in several years. I understand exactly what you did and why. I'd probably do exactly the same thing if I was a dry as you are. When my soil gets so dry in drought periods that rainfall or sprinkler irrigation rolls downhill on the surface of the ground and isn't even absorbed, I know I've waited too late to start watering. I think it is always better, even (maybe especially) in winter to water the dry ground. If it gets too, too dry and planting time is approaching, it can be hard to keep the soil moist enough for seeds to sprout. The big mistake I made in one dry spring (may have been 2003 or 2005) is that I planted and watered sparingly waiting for rain to fall to give the seeds and plants more water. Well, rain never fell and by the time I realized that I should have been watering more heavily to get them off to a good start, the were pretty stunted and pathetic. It was a hard lesson to learn, but it made me a better gardener in succeeding dry years. Don't even mention those photos of those big old black clouds. They are fascinating but in a horrifying and very scarey type of way. I hope and pray we've learned enough about conservation and no-till commercial farming that we never put ourselves in that predicament again. Can you imagine the mass hysteria, especially on the part of the media with its 24-hour-news-cycle nowadays if we had something like that occurring? If you haven't read the book about the Dust Bowl days that I've linked below, I highly recommend it. I reread it once every 2 or 3 years to remind myself of how bad it was and what all those folks went through. We throw the word "diaster" and "catastophe" around pretty loosely nowadays, but those people who endured the Dust Bowl years really lived through a catastrophe and it lasted for years. Some of the old-timers here have told me stories about what it was like here in our county, and it wasn't pretty. One of them lived on land adjacent to ours and she tried to explain what it was like to have the big clouds of dust ruin the laundry you'd just washed, or blow through the cracks in walls, etc. into the house and cover everything with a fine layer of dust. She was a very small child then so I'm not sure how much she remembers directly and how much she remembers from hearing her folks talk about it later on their lives. I just can't imagine what it was like to endure 8 long years of catastrophe. My dad did tell me about the pure agony of watching crops fail over and over, which was a disaster for folks who essentially raised all their own food. So, if couldn't grow a crop, you couldn't eat. One thing that sticks in my memory from photos of those days is just how painfully thin everybody was. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: The Worst Hard Time