Usually, when we reach "Severe" on the Drought Monitor map, I pretty much give up and just stop watering. I can water enough in that level of drought to keep plants alive, but it is hard to give them enough irrigation to keep them happy and productive. I watered through Severe Drought this year. I intend to water for a while in Extreme Drought. Whether rain falls or not, I'll try to keep the garden going long enough to can a lot of salsa, candied jalapenos, and habanero gold. If the rain predicted by the QPF misses us again, though, I may cry. We are so dry that it is getting scary. I have a lot of large tomatoes that are about to break color. If we get heavy rainfall right now, it may ruin them by watering down their flavor. So, you think I am hoping it won't rain? Heck, no, bring it on! We need some good rain to slow down the drought more than we need yummy, tasty tomatoes. If the rain keeps missing us like it has been and we don't get good rainfall sometime in the next week, we're going to progress on to D-4 fairly fast. It is in Texas, creeping towards us. Here is a link that might be useful: Southern Region Drought Monitor

I've linked the two-day rainfall map below. I am not sure how many areas, if any, got enough rain this weekend to drop their county back to a lower category, but it is possible someone might have. The portion of Love County in which we live has dropped back two categories in about 3 weeks, so I think some of you might drop back one category in the next week or two. Here is a link that might be useful: Mesonet 2-Day Rainfall Map

Bon, They are defoliating in order to survive. If you are able, try to water them deeply at least once a week. That amount of watering will not bring them out of dormancy from a once-a-week deep watering, and you don't want them to because coming back out of dormancy too soon would just be stressful. However, watering is essential for them now. They are saying to you "I am too dry, so I am going dormant to save myself, but I need help or I'll die, so please water me." At least they are putting up a good fight to survive.If you cannot water them, they may progress to death. Moisten the leaf pile bit, but not too much. The last thing you want is a really wet leaf pile that could start cooking inside and combust the way that hay bales do if they are baled and put up in storage while too wet in the middle. What I do is this. I keep them a little moist, but if a fire is on the property next door, I wet down a couple of old blankets and throw them over the compost pile. It is hard to get a wet blanket to burn, so the wet blanket should keep your leaf pile from igniting. In the last couple of years, we've had 3 or 4 fires each summer on property adjacent to ours or across the street from ours, and I'm always worried that if the firefighters don't get those fires extinguished quickly, they'll burn up my compost pile, my remaining bales of hay mulch and my garden, so I usually run out with the hose to try to protect them. My gourds are now sunburning. I left them on the vines hoping enough foliage would hang in there for a while so they could dry down on the vine and cure they way they usually do. I think I will pull them today and try to dry them in the shade. They may still be too green inside. The foliage is toast so there's nothing left to shade them. Next year, plant your gourds in April or May so they have a chance to flower and form gourds in summer and then be dry enough to harvest by fall. Late gourd plantings often have gourds that are still very green by frost and sometimes they cure well (though slowly) but other times they don't. Most years we probably are not hotter than most other places in OK, but last year we hit 115-116 a couple of times at many places in our county, though not at our Mesonet station, and this year we've hit 112-114 at some places in our county, but there again not at our Mesonet station. I think our Mesonet station's highest temperature this summer may be 109, and that was yesterday. It also was 109 here yesterday. Overall, this summer has not felt as hot to me as last year overall, though there have been a few times that it felt so bad out there that I was sure it was the worst day ever, even though it wasn't. Often, when firefighters are fighting those multi-day fires, some of them don't even go home. They'll sleep at the nearest fire station, sleep in their fire trucks, or sleep on the ground. That's why clean socks and undergarments are so helpful to them. Often they fight fire between 12 and 20 hours a day and just catnap. Sometimes they cannot sleep, which I think is part heat stress and partly from the big adrenalin rush that is inherent in firefighting. After having that adrenalin rush through an entire firefighting day, their bodies cannot just "turn off" the adrenalin easily and allow them to sleep. I heard that some departments received so many donations of bottled water and Gatorade that they ran out of room to store it, so that's good, although I don't know if it is true of all the fire departments in the fire-stricken areas. The firefighters always can use bandanas and small towels too. A lot of our guys wear or carry bandanas to use to wipe sweat off their faces, to keep the sun off their neck, or to wet down and wear around their neck or on their heads to help keep them cool. I buy white terry cloth shop towels at Sam's or CostCo in bundles of 60, and you wouldn't believe how many bundles I buy in a year. We started out using old kitchen or bath towels, but I like the shop towels better. Trust me when I tell you that firefighters flinch when you hand them a flowery kitchen towel or a hot pink hand towel from someone's bathroom. White is simple and isn't too feminine for their taste. Socks get wet fairly often and are very uncomfortable inside those fire boots....your feet just steam, so they love having an extra pair or two of dry socks stashed away in the fire truck. I usually have dry tube socks stashed away in one of the cabinets at the fire station so that anyone whose socks are wet can grab a spare pair. My concern level for all parts of Oklahoma remains incredibly high. Between the heat and the drought, I believe many counties have the highest KBDI they've ever had, or are approaching that level, and August is not necessarily known for being a very rainy month. We need rain in a big way before the winds pick up speed in autumn. Even last week and this week the winds are high enough in some places that fires have been and will be hard to control. This year it isn't just plant stress we have to worry about---people and animals are really stressed too. As we go about our daily and routine activities, I think it can be easy to forget that we are now living through what likely will go down in history as the worst drought ever in the USA since they began keeping records. That's monumental. For decades after this, people may look back at this point in history and talk about the drought of 2011 and 2012 they way our parents and grandparents talked about the drought years of the 1930s and 1950s. Dawn

While a small percentage of the areas in the higher drought categories saw improvement, overall the area in OK that is either in drought or abnormally dry continued to increase, as shown on this week's Drought Monitor, linked below. 12/6/16 Oklahoma Drought Monitor Map For the first time in ages, my part of Love County is showing up in the Abnormally Dry category, even though we are, overall, above average in rainfall for the current calendar year. I'm not going to let it bother me since we still have tons of mud and massive puddles standing from the 2+" of rainfall we've received in the last 8 or 10 days. I think it is 2.7" to be specific. We might be abnormally dry on paper, but we don't feel dry. It helps that the moisture generally evaporates more slowly at this time of the year than it does in summer. And, for the folks on this forum who post from other states, here's the entire U. S. Drought Monitor Map: 12/6/16 U S Drought Monitor Map I would imagine we won't see much improvement in OK for a while since December and January tend to be two of our driest months here. Snow, if it falls, generally doesn't melt down into impressive amounts of precipitation unless it is a really, really wet snow.