Nancy in Venice, that might help explain why Gruss in Aachen is not doing anything for me in cold, damp zone 5. accuweather.com is out with their winter forecast this weekend. They are anticipating continued dryness for the PNW and Northern CA, but some rain for the Southwest, including So. CA. Also cold and snow in the interior midAtlantic states, where I am. Good for roses, bad for driving. I might park the car for the duration. Tibbrix, I was raised by pennysqueezing, use it up, make it do, do without parents. The nickels howled in agony as did us kids "deprived" of the enticing consumer products displayed by our classmates. A mythical entity named "dollars" resided at The Bank, and were never seen at our house. You can learn the easy way, by figuring things out, or the hard way, and it looks like most Americans are set to learn the hard way. I have been thinking, in light of recent events, that maybe it might be wise for Californians to be planting some Neem and Karandja trees, now while the seeds are still available. There is a guaranteed market for the whole array of products of both species.

Jay, Ever since you posted that your dog was shedding, I've been saying to myself "I guess I'm wrong and the dog is right....." LOL. The early shedding really threw me for a loop because I just didn't feel like winter was done with us yet. I've seen our dogs and cats shed early, like when we're having 70 degree days in January for example, but I've never seen them regrow a thicker coat almost immediately. Maybe it is because my cats and dogs spend a lot of time either inside the house or insulated (but unheated) garage when the weather is either very hot or very cold. I hope we're on the southern edge of a moist area too if the alternative is little or no moisture. A neutral El Nino doesn't scare me too much in terms of rainfall because in our part of the state a neutral El Nino generally brings us above-average moisture. On the other hand, we just had a year with above-average moisture and I don't know that we've had two back-to-back good rainfall years since we've been here. Of course, we've only been here 11 years. As long as they don't start saying the dreaded words 'La Nina', I don't worry about drought. Once La Nina is headed this way, I do get concerned. Most La Nina years bring most of Oklahoma a lot of moisture but it brings our southern edge of OK little to no moisture for 6 or 8 or 10 months.....La Nina gave us our 2008-2009 drought in southern OK and all the wildfires that lasted until the rain really began falling in earnest in April 2009. The weather is so bad at Sky Harbor Int'l Airport in Phoenix that they have cancelled flights for the rest of today. I think it is wind, but assume some rain might be falling too and that means it is moving our way. El Nino is just beating up on the western US. Tonight is our last 'warm' night for a while, and then our lows start going back into the 30s again. In a normal year, I'd be seeing the first hatch of the grasshoppers in the pastures about now, and I haven't seen a one. I don't know if they are (a) frozen to death, (b) drowned to death, or (c) waiting for your shedding/unshedding dog to send out the word that it is OK...or not OK..... Dawn

I've been awaiting the El Nino update that will advise us that an El Nino is developing and we'll have a really rainy fall and winter, but that El Nino is taking its own sweet time. If something happens, and we stay neutral or have only a very weak El Nino, I don't know that we'll see good rainfall recovery. Carol, It is hard to imagine you or Dorothy or others in your area will get close to average annual rainfall for 2012 unless you're flooded all fall, and no one wants that. Still, we can hope y'all will get as much as possible. When our rainfall was stuck at 12" in August 2011, I began to wonder if we'd even hit 20" for the year, which would have been about an inch over 50% of our average annual rainfall, but I felt like 20" was something realistic to hope for. We had a wet fall last year and ended up with 23", for 2011 but that still was 15" below average so we started 2012 too dry as it was. Amazingly, as dry as last year was here, it wasn't even our worst year since we moved here. Our worst year was 2003, when we had less than 19" of rain. I remember that year well. I made the mistake in spring of continuing to think that rain surely would fall "any day now", and it didn't. I wasn't watering as much in early spring as I should have been and my plants stalled. I learned from that lesson, and no longer wait for the expected spring rains to fall. I just irrigate if they aren't falling. We go through lots of rain gauges too. I try to remember to bring them in before they freeze and break, but don't always succeed. One of these days I am going to buy a really good one. We have had the best luck with putting one on a wooden post, so Tim cannot run over it with the lawn mower or shatter it with the weed eater, a common fate of previous rain gauges. I have kept peppers alive in pots all winter just by dragging them into the garage on a few cold nights. They produced all winter, but the fruit that set in December and January was very slow to grow and ripen. I think that with pots in the greenhouse, the fruit will grow and ripen faster. I intend to find out this winter, but I am still undecided about whether to heat the greenhouse on cold nights or just carry the pot of peppers to the well-insulated garage. I have big plans for a fall and winter garden, but they are stalled while this heat wave drags on. After the cooldown hits, I am going to sow seeds of all kinds of kale, collards, lettuce, Swiss chard,radishes, spinach, cool-season herbs, beets, etc. I'll put the floating row cover over the hoops over those beds when really cold weather threatens. I also have two kinds of cabbage and one kind of broccoli growing in paper cups and ready to go in the ground as soon as the heat breaks. I was hoping I'd get them in the ground this week, but here we are still waiting for cooler weather....I have them where they get morning sun and afternoon shade right now and they still are not very happy. You'll love having a greenhouse in the winter. I cannot believe how much it simplified seed-starting this past spring. I sure didn't miss carrying all those flats of plants in and out when cold nights threatened, especially since my lighted plant shelves are upstairs in the weight room. I cannot even begin to guess how many trips I've made up and down those stairs with flats of plants in all the years since we moved here. Larry, My rain gauge never matches the rainfall readings from town, from the NWS Co-operative weather observer in our county, or from our Mesonet station. I have noticed, though, that in most years even though our daily totals don't match, we often end up with about the same amount of total rainfall for the year. There are some exceptions. On at least three occasions I can remember, our part of the county got incredibly heavy rainfall that missed other parts of the county. On one of those occasions we got 9.25", though some other parts of our county got about 6", and on another one, we got almost 9" while other parts of the county got between 2" to nothing. We also got 12.89" once when some other parts of the county farther from the river only got half that, or even less. This year, some parts of western Love County got rain several times in the summer when we didn't, but then we got 3" last week and they didn't get nearly that much, so it seems to average out pretty evenly over time. Friends who live a mile south of us often don't get as much rain as we get and friends less than a mile north usually do. I think we are in a pretty good part of our specific county because overall we do get some good rainfall occasionally even in the worst years. Dawn

I think traditionally we begin feeling El Nino's effects after Christmas. That's why they called it El Nino--because it arrives so close to Christmas. It isn't cut and dried though, and I guess it will get here when it gets here, if it does at all. El Nino varies from cycle to cycle. Sometimes we have very strong El Ninos. The last really strong El Nino was when we still lived in Texas. I think it was in 1996 or 1997 and we had flooding rains in mid- to late-spring. One thing I have noticed about El Nino in the last 10-15 years is that it tends to have an opposite effect on us here than what it has on Tim's family in Pennsylvania. So, if El Nino brings them tons of snow there (like it did Friday and yesterday), then we'll be drier than usual here in southern OK. And, if we have massive winter/spring rain, they tend to have less rain than usual there in Pennsylvania. So, based on this past week's storm, maybe El Nino is going to affect them more than it affects us. That's not a very scientific forecast, but it works for us. Our local forecaster told us a couple of months ago that he expected only slightly colder weather in our part of the state (and we have had that in December here, even being colder than Jay's location in Kansas a few times) and probably a bit wetter winter, but not massive amounts of rain because this is only a moderate El Nino. I haven't had to water because we have had an inch or two of rain here in Love County this month. November was warmer and drier than usual for us, but that's a pre-El Nino month anyway. I've linked NOAA data below that shows El Nino's typical impact during the time frame they studied. I noticed for us here in southern OK, a typical El Nino brings us 134% of our usual rainfall for Nov.-Dec. in the years they studied. (We had that in 2009----maybe southern OK got its El Nino weather one year early. LOL) I don't pretend to be a forecaster, but our trees, animals and other plants aren't acting like they're expecting cold weather. We still have trees with leaves and some of those leaves are green but other trees like the post oaks that normally hold their brown leaves throughout the winter here are already bare. I think Mother Nature is mixed up this year. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: