nice. all the easties get rain :)

I ordered the final components for my drip irrigation system today, so I'm prepared now if the drought intensifies as predicted. After our wet fall I was hoping that the forecast was wrong, but our seven day forecast has been getting progressively drier. I'm probably not going to start worrying for a few more months, though. It's the spring rainfall that really matters here. If that's even close to normal, then we'll already be a lot better off than last year.

Lisa, It is almost enough to make one want to move east, isn't it?

Heather, I watched throughout December as the rains tapered off here and began to kill my hopes that the wet fall would continue into winter. I've also watched the 7-day forecast too, hoping for some sign, and the sign I'm getting is that it isn't likely to rain. So, I guess it is what it is.

I'm hoping for spring rain too. Were it not for the May rain here last year at our house (about 7"), I wouldn't have had much of a garden at all. By August we'd only had about a foot of rain, so that 7" in May was very significant.

Most of our ponds are empty, the swamp is not swampy, the springs aren't running, and the creek is just a tiny trickle, so I am in full drought-planning mode until further notice.

Dawn

That is a very discouraging map! I am no where near the getting rain zone. Last year was my first garden, "Garden of Fail". I really do not know how to plan for this year! I have no shade, I live on a hill, and wow I wish I lived somewhere tropical!!

Lizgyrl, I don't live anywhere close to the east either, and it is discouraging. However, my garden produced great until July last year even in the midst of tough conditions. It just didn't produce as much as it normally does. My mistake was to try to keep it producing in July and August, which was a waste of time, effort and money. This year I'll just expect spring and fall production, and if rain falls in summer, that will be good but I am not counting on a lot of summer rainfall, since the summer rains can be fairly scant even in a normal year.

To plan for a drought, I look for short-season vegetable varieties that will have a chance to make a crop before the heat and lack of moisture shut them down in July or August. When you look at our average last frost dates for spring and average first frost dates for fall, it looks like we have a really long growing season here. That's a bit misleading though, because extreme summer heat can shut down the production of most veggies, except for the most heat-tolerant ones like okra, southern peas and melons in the middle of that long growing season. What we really have is several mini-seasons within our theoretically long growing season. In a drought year, it is more like we have a spring growing season and a fall growing season with a couple of hellishly hot months sandwiched in between. You can work around those hot months by planting to get good spring and fall harvests even if mid-summer harvests are poor.

For example, if you want to plant green beans in a drought year, it is important to get them into the ground as soon as the soil temps and air temps are warm enough in spring, because once the really hot summer weather arrives, their production drops. So, I choose the most heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant varieties I can find, and I plant as early as possible, and I look for varieties with shorter days-to-maturity numbers. This means I might be planting more bush beans than pole beans since bush beans make a crop faster and for pole beans I'll chose varieties with DTMs in the 50s-70s instead of DTMs in the 70s-90s.

It is the same thing with most other crops. However, most varieties of okra, southern peas (blackeyes, pinkeyes, purple hull pinkeyes, xipper, lady, cream and crowder peas), melons, some peppers and some tomatoes will produce well in periods of drought as long as they get adequate moisture, which may or may not be possible but I always figure I can water enough to get something from those veggie plants. A lot depends on how much spring rainfall you get and on whether your area is subject to water restrictions/rationing in the summer months.

With watermelons, in a drought year I plant only the small ones, often called refrigerator melons because they are small enough to fit into the fridge easily, because they survive on less water than the varieties that make really large melons. It is a lot easier to get ripe melons from a plant that produces 8 or 10 or 15 lb. melons in a drought year, than from a plant that produces 20 or 40-lb. melons.

I'll be posting my veggie Grow List for 2012 today, and it will have some very heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant varieties on it that do better in drought than some of the varieties I usually plant in a wetter year.

In order to have better results in a drought year, I pay extra attention to soil preparation in winter and add as much organic matter to the garden beds as I reasonably can. Then, after the plants are up and growing, I mulch them heavily to keep the soil cooler and more moist, and I shade them with shade cloth or old sheets once the real heat kicks in. Even so-called "full sun" plants often do quite well in our climate with only 4 to 6 hours of direct sunlight because our heat and sunlight tend to be quite intense.

There's a lot you can do to work around anticipated drought conditions, but if we have another epic drought in 2012 like we had in 2011, then there is only so much you can do to help your plants cope with weather like that.

With each thing we like to plant, there's always going to be some varieties that produce better in heat and those are the ones I try to plant in drought years. So, it is more important to plant with your brain than your heart in a year when you're expecting drought, choosing the varieties likely to do best in drought conditions instead of just going with your usual favorites that might require more water and still might not produce as well.

With flowers and herbs, I plant fewer in drought years and make the same decisions about varieties---which do best in low-water situations and which ones are the toughest, sturdiest survivors?

I guess the big thing about a drought year is that we know we cannot force some things to grow well and produce well in the absence of adequate moisture and in the presence of extreme heat, so we have to garden smarter and probably lower our expectations somewhat.

Still, even in a drought year, we can have great harvests. Last year I had the largest potato and onion harvests ever, and about the best lettuce year we've ever had as well. The lettuce was burning up in the heat by the time June arrived. That is fairly typical, though, for lettuce in our climate. Some cool-season crops, like sugar snap peas and broccoli, did not perform as well in 2011 as they usually do because we had too many days in spring when the temps were hitting the 80s and 90s which was too hot for those plants and caused their growth to stall. Still, when the May rains brought us more moderate temps and lots of moisture even those veggie crops produced something, though not as much as usual.

Dawn

Ugh. We're in the persistance area too, so we'll be dragging out the soaker hoses again. They actually worked pretty well last year, but even though I could keep things watered, the heat took a huge toll. I've taken a break from gardening over the holidays but now am ready to start thinking/planning for this year. This is helpful to know because last summer when selecting plant varieties I put more emphasis on space limitations than heat/drought tolerance. I'll certainly know better this year! Another drawback last year was the garden wasn't ready to plant early so things that could/should have gone in the ground earlier were planted later than is ideal. This year I'll plant early!

Suzie