Today , worst canning or cooking injury ever! i was making the super finiky black cherry syrup. i wanted to make sure it was thick enough to use on waffles. so i turned it up towards the end i am constantly stiring and its full on molten its not just boiling its foaming like crazy . so i start getting it into my jars . after hours of picking, pitting , then stirring i want every last drop! so i tip up the hot pan to scoop out the rest. i dont know what i did if i hit the side of my funnel or what. i feel a huge splotch of it hit my hand and i know immediatly im in trouble. i have burnt myself plenty of times baking , canning with steam usually i just put it in ice water use aloe and im fine. as soon as i put my hand under cold water the boiling hot molten sugar turns hard and brittle and is stuck on my hand . i know it has to come off so im scrubbing and washing and its like my skin liquified. i can see it being pulled off with the now hard candy on my hand. im thinking ohhhh sh*t this is bad but ask my son to grab aloe any tylonal . normally aloe is cooling and might feel sticky but it doesnt hurt. this was insane pain im almost throwubg up it stings so bad. i am looking at my hand and around the area thats burnt with no top layers of skin and is red and pissed its turning white and yellow. i gave up went to the ER. they said omg yah thats bad! so i got some cream and pain meds and have to go back daily for a few days so they can change badages and check its ok. weirdly it hurts some places but others theres no pain at all. where the pain is its super crazy bad. No blister! i think i went passed that. weirdly even non stick hospital grade stuff sticks to it.

Randy, I know it's been there for at least a year. I think that when they reformatted (was that last year?), it suddenly appeared out of nowhere. There was a prior fire info page I used to look at, but it wasn't nearly as wonderful as this one is. I look at this page every single day (sometimes many times a day because it updates so often) and check our Keetch-Byram Drought Index numbers which, right now, are the highest I can remember seeing since we've been here. I had a harder time finding the KBDI back during the 2005-2006 drought and usually could only find a color-coded map that gave an approximate range. Every now and then a local weather forecaster or a NWS fire weather advisory statement would give us an approx. KBDI range for southcentral OK. On bad fire weather days, I tell our firefighters what the burning index and spread component are so they can have them in mind while fighting fires. The spread component, humidity and wind speed/direction are critical numbers we need when fighting a large grassfire. The ignition component and fuel moisture loads are helpful, too, and I use the dispersal conditions not just to estimate how heavy smoke will be, but to figure out if it is a good day to spray something or to run the sprinkler. Sometimes, this year, the spread component has been scarey-high, especially on days when the wind exceeds 30 m.p.h. At our monthly fire meetings, I tell the firefighters the current KBDI--and when it got to 630, we thought things were as bad as they could be Now that it is at 669, we all are really nervous about leaving our homes for more than a few minutes. It is very rare for anyone here to ever have a KBDI of 700 and I think it would take prolonged exceptional drought, or daily winds that were exceptionally high, to cause that to occur. Once the KDBI exceeds 600, even live plants, organic material in soil, underground roots, etc. will burn. When the town of Ringgold, Texas, burned in 15 minutes on Jan. 1, 2006, I believe their KBDI was only about 630 and the firefighters had no chance of stopping a wildfire driven by winds in excess of 50 m.p.h. One of the reasons that the prospect of grassfires and wildfires bothers me so much is that I know I'd lose organic material in the soil that I've been putting there for 10 years now. I'm not even worried about the house burning.....it is insured. My veggie garden and flower beds are not. : ) In 2005-2006 we had underground roots smoulder and smoke for days and days after a fire. People would see smoke literally rising from the ground and would call 9-1-1 to report a "fire". It was insane and kept the fire depts. running to certain areas repeatedly to check out the reports of smoke. There, I've told you more than you asked, but I just wanted to emphasize how much I love this page. Since our idiot county commissioners (and they know who they are) lifted the burn ban "temporarily" this week to let people burn accumulated trash, brush, pastures (awful decison!), etc., the fire depts. have been busy, esp. the ones in the western portion of the county. I've been spending a lot of time monitoring the OKFIRE page because of it. I also like the Burn Ban map.....just because it is a good barometer of how dry it is around the state. I hope our commissioners reinstate the burn ban next week. I have the sprinkler running outside right now because today's fire danger is so extreme. Enjoy the lovely weekend weather. I bet your plants are loving the heat in the greenhouse! Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Burn Ban map (updates constantly)

Tigerdawn, I hope the Wizard is in the mood to freely disperse water everywhere in response to Jay's request. Jay, I am concerned that the wind could be worse than forecast too. In April 2009 we were expecting wind, I think, gusting a little over 50 and it seems like some parts of the state had gusts over 60. Also, in April 2009, we thought we were prepared, and then the fires were so much worse than anticipated. So, even if you think you're prepared, you know you're wondering "how much worse could it be than what I'm expecting?". I just spent a few minutes reading the updates at the Texas Forest Service website and there have been multiple large fires started in Texas this week where the cutting of pipe was the cause. One thing Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas all share is that most of each state is in some form of drought and we face wicked fire danger tomorrow. Texas' largest wildfire (nicknamed either the Aspermont Fire or the Swenson Fire) has been burning since Wednesday, has burnt between 61,000 and 71,000 acres, has 4 heads and is 0% contained. They're in trouble with that fire when tomorrow's fire weather peaks. I hope there aren't any small towns in its path (or, for that matter, large towns). In Texas, the Texas Forest Service says that tomorrow's expected fire weather conditions are expected to be the WORST EVER in Texas history. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? I'm linking an article about tomorrow that gives a few statistics about what happened in our region on April 9, 2009. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Worst Fire Conditions in Texas History Predicted for Sunday

Laura, There is some reason you have spider mites in such large numbers then. It wouldn't have to be that you specifically are using pesticides. It could be that you're in an area of town where pesticide use is heavy (or, even worse, the city sprays pesticides to kill mosquitoes and wipe out lots of beneficials in the process) and that wipes out the beneficial insect population that normally helps keep the spider mites under control. I had a lot more trouble in town where neighbors were big pesticide users. Out here in the middle of nowehere, pesticide use is way down compared to what it was in town (except in a bad grasshopper year when the ranchers spray like mad) but herbicide use is up. It also could be you get nitrogen runoff from overfertilized yards if you're in town and your land has rainwater run across it from elsewhere. There's lots of possibilities. I just know that every time someone tells me they have massive spider mites, something is out of balance in their own little ecosystem. The reason plants that are overfed nitrogen are so appealing to certain pests is because they are high in carbs and sugar. That's why too much nitrogen is bad, and I avoid it for that reason. The reason pesticides hurt is because they wipe out the beneficial insects. It could be you have a low population of beneficials for a reason that isn't your fault or too much nitrogen for the same reason. I'm not saying it is the fault of the gardener that spider mites show up, but just that certain practices allow them to get out of control. Because none of us has a protective bubble covering the air space over our property, we are affected by what people around us do. Several years ago in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, some cities went crazy spraying for mosquitoes because of the West Nile virus. Horrible things happened. Organic gardeners who'd spent years building up a good population of beneficial insects lsot them. People who had fish in lily ponds, and some of them were very expensive koi, lost them. Those folks weren't doing anything wrong--they and their ecosystem just were negatively impacted by someone else's action. It happens all the time. Several years ago during a severe grasshopper outbreak, ranchers sprayed seemingly nonstop to combat the grasshoppers, and we lost many songbirds including all the local bluebirds. I wasn't spraying anything, but noticed a definite decrease in bird numbers because birds travel from place to place. Think of your garden as an ecosystem. In a healthy ecosystem, everything stays more or less in balance and no one insect becomes too dominant. That's because every insect pest is eaten by some other one (or by birds, toads, etc.) and every insect eats something or someone. So, if everything is in balance, no particular insect gets out of control and overpopulates. When something, like spider mites, runs amok, there's some reason why. The key is to analyze it and figure out what is out of balance. I have a perfect example from our garden. This year we moved the potatoes out of the main garden and into an unfenced auxiliary area. It seemed to be working just fine, until I realized that every time I hilled up the potatoes, the hens got in there and did their 'digging and scratching' looking for bugs and un-hilled the potatoes. So, I hammered some fence stakes into the ground and put a 3' tall chicken wire fence around the potatoes. Just a couple of days later we had a huge explosion in the population of Colorado Potato Beetles, which normally aren't a problem for us. I hand-picked them forever, but was wondering what was 'out of balance'. Well, first I moved them from an area where they'd grown forever and it is likely the beneficials that feed on potato beetles were still over there in the big garden waiting for the CPBs to show up. In the meantime, 20 or 30' away, the CPBs were in a garden with a low population of beneficials. One night, as I was leaving the potato garden, there was an agitated turtle trying to get in. A light bulb went off in my head. Every year that turtle lives in the potato bed and probably was eating CPBs. Because I'd fenced him AND the chickens out, nothing was in my potato garden eating the CPBs. So, I opened the gate and let him in. I also have let the chickens back in on a limited basis. They seem to be controlling the CPBs again, and I've been reminded that the beneficial garden helpers have to be able to do their jobs. If I move a crop away form the beneficials, I have to take care of the pests myself until beneficials can relocate themselves to the new area. Whenever I have an issue with pests that I normally don't have, if I think about it, I can figure out what has changed. This year we have grasshoppers galore. Normally they aren't a huge problem, but this year they are. What changed? Four-legged predators killed off our 30 guineas last year and we made a conscious decision to not replace them this year in case predators are hanging around wanting to eat them again this year. (We're going to get some again next year.) Since one guinea can eat up to two pounds of grasshoppers a day, that means we're really missing those guineas and it shows in the huge numbers of hoppers we're seeing this year. This probably would have been a bad hopper year anyway, but not having the guineas has made it worse. I have noticed the songbirds are hanging out in the garden more this year and I assume they're bug-hunting while in there. I don't know exactly what it is, but for some reason, you seem to be lacking the beneficial insects that eat spider mites. The solution is to buy and release some or try to attract some. All I did the first three years here was work to improve the soil and to attract beneficials and build up their population. Once I achieved that, the pest problems diminished considerably. I use a few 'tricks' to help me manage the spider mites, and I'll talk about them tomorrow. Dawn