Keith, That's a great article. My introduction to fire behavior came during the drought of 2005-2006 when we had only a little under 19" of rain in 2005 and our "winter fire season", which normally is mostly a spring season, began in October. We were in extreme to exceptional drought. How dry was it? Tree roots burned underground. Some wind-driven fires required 20 to 30 fire departments (our county has 13 VFDs at the time) including firefighters from Texas. It was horrendous. It continued into 2006. I cannot even explain the impact except to say that our tiny, 3 to 4 year-old VFD went from about 40 calls a year to over 240 in the worst year of that drought. We never slept. This year, we have had sporadic "bursts" of grass fires that come in spurts. Now that all the vegetation is dry and dormant, it is happening a lot more often than it was in October or November. In fact, our VFD has been out with six others at a fire all afternoon and just cleared from that fire a few minutes ago. We are fairly wet here, but dry dormant vegetation doesn't retain moisture and having wet, muddy ground means the firefighting brush trucks often get stuck in the mud. That's happening at pretty much every fire in our county since it rained hard last week and the week before. The folks in SE OK are in serious trouble and will have a very severe winter fire season. So will the counties just across the Red River from us. (They already are.) Been there before...not only in 2005-2006 but also the last half of 2007, 2008 and the first 4 months of 2009. I dread it. Every morning, I check several fire sites, including the fire weather forecast from the NWS and the OKFire site available via the Mesonet before I come to GardenWeb. Our firefighters know I watch those fire weather websites like a hawk and I let them know when they're facing a High to Extreme Fire Weather Day, or let them know when our county's fire danger ramps up from Low or Moderate to High, Very High or Extreme. The worst fires I've heard of lately have been in central OK where several recent fires have spread to and damaged/destroyed homes and other structures. It is going to be a long winter. Rain won't help much, if any, at this point. In our county, the Keetch-Byram Drought Index is very low because we have had lots of rain since September. However, some counties have KBDIs in the 500s, and that is very serious stuff because the KBDI tells you how intense your fires are likely to become. I don't know that 2011 will be as bad statewide as 2005-2006 was, but for the very dry portions of the state, including parts of central OK and southeastern OK, it has that potential. Rainfall can be deceiving because a lot depends on when the rain falls. We were dry and burning like crazy here in Love County in Jan-April of 2009. Then, on either April 29th or 30th, 12.89" of rain fell. Now, if you had looked at our rainfall total for 2009 at the end of April, you would have thought we had grear rainfall, but that was not really true---what we had was great rainfall on one day only. I say it isn't that bad here yet and it isn't, but there are fires in our county virtually every day. We had an awfully bad one on Jan. 2nd and another pretty aggressive one today. I wouldn't want to be a firefighter in SE OK this winter because they are going to be incredibly busy. Dawn

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

Hi Jan, It is good to see you here. I'd been wondering how y'all were doing up there since last year's horrific drought. I don't know how you grow anything there in 'No Man's Land", and I am sorry most of your pasture didn't survive. I hope you continue to enjoy the garden and the break from school. Summertime seems so much shorter to me now than it did back when I was a kid. I'm glad you're getting tomatoes and happy to hear this year is better for you than last year. To me, nothing says 'summertime' like a juicyy, fresh-from-the-garden tomato. I wish I could send you some rain because we've had plenty since the end of May. It isn't that we have had huge amounts of it, but we are on track to have at least an average year. Even in an average year, the summertime droughts are brutal, but an average year will seem wet compared to last year. Our rainfall last year was about 22" and our average is about 38-40". Right now we've had just over 20". At this time last year, we'd had maybe 10 or 11", so it feels like we're wet, wet, wet, but then you know how the sun evaporates the soil moisture so quickly. An El Nino weather pattern may be developing, and if it is, I am glad and am hoping for a good, strong El Nino. I don't know what El Nino does for the rest of Oklahoma, but in our part of the state it usually means good winter and spring rain. Wouldn't that be lovely? When I look at the Keetch Byram Drought Index Map, I am shocked every week by how dry the panhandle remains. I don't know if y'all ever are going to make it out of drought. Now that I mentioned the KBDI Map, I'll link it. Not only are y'all really dry, but so is a big swath of southeastern OK. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Keetch Byram Drought Index Map

Jessaka, Even in most drought years my herbs survive as long as I water them once or twice a month. It just depends....if your soil can hold enough water to keep them happy, they'll live even if they look sort of puny and sad. They bounce back well when higher moisture levels return. They are in improved clay so it both drains fairly well and holds moisture fairly well. In our one area that has sandy soil, I generally cannot keep herbs alive in moderate (or worse) drought because the sand drains too quickly. Paula, I'm sorry you lost your herbs. It has been an awful summer and I don't know how much relief autumn will bring in terms of rainfall. With the grasshoppers, I know Barbara used neem and it worked for her. However, I don't use it in my garden and likely never will. Although generally neem will not kill beneficials (which are mostly carnivores) in the same way it will kill pest insects (which are mostly herbivores), it will smother and kill any beneficials in the garden at the time it is sprayed if it gets on them. Since I have worked so hard for 12 years to build up a good population of beneficials I just won't spray anything that will harm them. I'd rather lose plants to grasshoppers than set back the beneficial population because a 'disturbed' beneficial insect population can take several years to recover. Because I have a good population of beneficials, I haven't sprayed any pesticide in the garden this summer...not even spinosad. We have had a lot of pests, but if I am patient, the beneficials take care of most of them and I handpick or vacuum up the rest. (Not a single hornworm this year!) We have about 12-15 grasshoppers per square yard in our pastures, but somewhat smaller numbers in the mowed lawns, shrub and flower beds, and veggie gardens. That sort of infestation normally results in massive damage. Am I seeing massive damage? Well, I saw it during the last 2 weeks of July and the first two weeks of August when the population was probably at its peak, as was the heat. Since then, I really haven't seen further plant damage except of the most minor kind (holes in leaves) even though new hoppers seem to be hatching out weekly. I think the birds and the resident population of Noseuma locuste is taking out a fair number of the hoppers because even though I'm seeing more small ones, I'm seeing steadily decreasing numbers of large ones, and the large ones I see aren't feeding on my garden. Maybe I'd feel compelled to try harder to kill them if I was continuing to see major plant damage, but I'm not. Grasshopper populations cycle up and down, so there's no way to know if this is the peak year (I think it is) and if we'll see ever-decreasing numbers the next 2 or 3 years or if next year will be the peak year. We'll know more after APHIS finishes their fall grasshopper counts and publishes their numbers in the fall. If this is not the peak year, then, yes, I have serious concerns about next year. If this is the peak, I don't think they'll do nearly as much damage next year as this year. Spraying anything (ranchers use stuff like Dimlin or sevin and some other registered pesticides homeowners cannot and should not use) for grasshoppers is a temporary fix. Grasshoppers are migratory. If you are in a rural or semi-rural area, you can spray your garden weekly with Sevin or neem and still have more hoppers move in within days of each spray date. It just depends on what kinds of fields surround you and on how green they are. Grasshoppers actually prefer grassland/range and really won't harm a garden too much most years. Some days I can be outside and walk through the garden and pasture and yard and see relatively few hoppers, and then a few hours later, a new bunch flies in and they are everywhere. All migratory insects like hoppers and army worms are hard to control since more keep coming and coming and coming. Blister beetles are showing up now in small numbers and I welcome them because they eat grasshopper eggs. In a bad grasshopper year, I almost always know it will be bad by February because I'll start seeing hoppers that early here. (2010 was an exception, perhaps because of all the cold and the snow.) So, if I am seeing an early hatch next year, I'll stock up on Nosema locuste and use it early and often. During the bad grasshopper years in the early 2000s, I put it out three years in a row and had relatively low damage then for another 4 or 5 years. Sitting here in a very rural area surrounded by thousands of acres of rangeland interspersed with hickory-oak woodlands, I know that I'll always have a gazillion insects. So, my goal is never to wipe out the entire population of anything (well, OK, would like to wipe out the whole population of stinkbugs snd squash bugs and squash vine borers, but it ain't gonna happen) but rather to maintain a healthy ecosystem so that the good bugs (and good fungi and good bacteria) help control the bad bugs so that no one single insect becomes too dominant. Some people garden organically exactly the same way they garden chemically, except their poisons of choice are natural instead of synthetic in origin. I try not to do that and I don't know what to call the form of gardening I do because it isn't organic gardening in that sense. Instead I just try to focus on building healthy soil and atttracting/maintaining beneficials instead of trying to poison undesirable pests. Some people refer to it as sustainable gardening, although I think you also can garden sustainably while using natural bio-insecticides. Some people call it 'beyond organic'. I guess I'd call it mostly no-kill, no-till gardening. I know God made every creature for a purpose and every creature has a place in the food web, so I just try to 'let them be'. It probably hurts my harvest a bit, but I always have plenty of everything to eat, dehydrate, can, freeze and give away, so I can tolerate a certain level of pest damage. Would I spray anything now in the hopes it would kill mature grasshoppers so they can't lay eggs for next year? No. I can't kill them all, more will keep coming and the ones that keep coming will keep laying eggs. However, I'll be ready to use Nosema locuste in the late winter/early spring if needed. It really has worked well enough for me in most years. Sometimes I think it didn't work because I have hoppers all over. Then, I'll visit with a neighboring gardener or rancher or two and find they have many more hoppers and vastly more hopper damage than we do, and I'll realize the Nosema locuste did work after all because it greatly reduced our numbers relative to other folks' numbers. Do I want to peacefully co-exist with the grasshoppers. Not exacly. Honestly, I wish they weren't here. But spraying to kill them doesn't fit in with my 'interfere as little as possible' philosophy, so I don't. How can my natural predators (birds, etc.) work to control the hoppers if I don't give them a chance to do it? You should do whatever makes you happy or whatever you feel comfortable with. My way of doing it isn't for everyone as I have a high tolerance for garden pests and am willing to let Mother Nature work the way she's supposed to. Dawn