It is sad. I cannot imagine how awful it is there.

I know how bad we look here, and we are, oddly enough, one of the wetter areas overall. I don't mean that we are wet--we are dry and crunchy with cracks in the ground up to 1.5" wide--but our year-to-date rainfall remains close to average even though it was way above average in the winter and early spring months and so we're sort of coasting on that long-ago rainfall. Knowing how bad we look with good rainfall, I cannot imagine how it looks there with poor rainfall.

One thing I've noticed in the last 6 weeks or so is that trees that appeared to survive last year's drought, leafed out fully this spring, looked green and gorgeous, etc. now have dropped their leaves and appear to be dead. I know such delayed death is common following exceptional drought periods, but it is some of the trees I love most---including two separate groves of mature native Persimmon trees that had the most gorgeous golden-orange foliage every September. One of them is about 1/3 mile south of our place and the other is about 1.25 miles east. So far, knock on wood, our younger and smaller grove of native persimmon trees looks good. I hope we don't lose them.

It is mind-boggling how long y'all have been without significant rainfall.

Tim and I were walking the edge of woodland beside my garden last night and looking at all the oak trees there that are just collapsing and falling to the ground, also likely to be a delayed death from stress. We will have a lot of deadfall and dead standing trunks to clean up this winter.

Scott, are you going to haul water to the pecan trees this month or just leave them in Mother Nature's hands?

Your fire danger there must be outrageously high. If all those dry trees start burning......well, I don't even want to think about it. It will be so very bad.

Dawn

News just said 11:00pm and still 99 degrees!

I will attempt to save 10 or 20 of the better old trees in elevated areas by watering as needed. I will also keep about 100 young trees in good shape. That's all I can do. I think the bottom-land trees will be fine. I estimate the other 200 or so older trees will die in the next 4 weeks without a good rain.

Bad as it would be on agriculture elsewhere, I keep hoping for a strong el nino...

The 20% rain chance has popped up for this weekend, so maybe a minor miracle???

Scott;
When watering my old pecan with a 3' base where am I digging down to water it? It's on a slope so I'll be rutting some type of trench and filling it briefly .. like watering in ten minute intervals so the water doesn't wash away.

I can't find where it needs this water. Say ... 4' away from the base or farther?

Last week the nuts fell off - hulls and all.

bon

Normally near the drip line at the edge of the canopy and then in a bit, but not really close to the trunk. I'd suggest watering along the drip-line on the high side of the tree, and whatever runs downhill will still get to the roots.

A muture tree that size will normally not have compacted soil inside the drip-line, so the water should soak in fairly well. I usually turn a hose about half speed and move it every 10 minutes or so. A tree that large could use 2000+ gallons in a really good watering to last it a while.

I finally found some reading on it:

"Trees drink water from the micro pores (small spaces) of the soil. The very small roots called "hair roots" do the drinking and they are found out toward the ends of the roots. The roots near the trunk are very large, like the limbs are where they branch out from the trunk, and get smaller and smaller as they get further from the trunk. That is why it is said to water the trees out near the drip line, which is the outer reaches of the limbs where the water drips from the leafs at the extremity of the canopy. There are hair roots a little closer in and a little further out, so we can give the trees water and nutrition in the area just inside the drip line and just outside it. Trees are all different and species of trees vary greatly in root structure. But you can be fairly certain that you are water you trees when you water under the drip line. Water applied near the trunk is mostly a waste though there are likely to be some hair roots from adjacent trees in that area that will benefit from the water."

This means I need to do some watering under the house. However, it also means I can easily use grey water for keeping that bugger alive. I don't want it to die because it's over the house and I can't get it down!

http://www.thetreetender.com/Watering%20Trees.html

Scott, I'll be hoping you get a minor miracle and rain falls and saves your trees. While I'm wishing and hoping, I'll also be praying for a major miracle. It would be a shame to lose those trees.

As much rain as y'all get there in an average year, I cannot believe we are talking about trees dying. I never, ever would have thought that you, Dorothy, Carol and other GW members in northeastern OK would see drought conditions like this in your normally very rainy area. It is just mind-boggling. For all my frustration with drought, I expect it here pretty much every year because it tends to happen so often, so it isn't as devastating for our trees as it is for yours.

Merrybookwyrn, I'm hoping for the same thing even though they're only forecasting a weak to moderate El Nino. Maybe, just maybe, they'll be wrong and it will be a strong one. All the right elements have to come together to give us a rainy 2013 and El Nino is just a part of it. We have to hope everything works together to dump tons of rain here in this part of the country.

Bon, water the drip line area as well as you can, and hope for the best. Our big pecan tree that shades the front yard came through last year's drought surprisingly well. It didn't look that great by the end of August, but I had watered it as well as I could, and the return of rain in the autumn apparently saved it. It sure has aborted a lot of limbs this year--much more than normal--but it still looks really good.

Dawn

Thanks Scott and Dawn. I'll do as much as I can, but probably not 2000 gallons. I suppose any little bit might help if it gets to the roots. I have never watered a tree before, in my life. First for everything, I suppose.

bon

Bon,

You're welcome. Most trees are very resilient and can survive the average drought with little to no irrigation as long as they already are well-established and have a really good root system. Young trees that are less than 3 to 5 years old may not be able to survive this summer without adequate supplemental irrigation.

At times like this when we have unprecedented drought (well, unprecedented at least in our lifetimes), even normally tough trees known to tolerate drought very well just cannot get enough water. Their roots cannot find water if there is no or very little moisture in the soil to find.

I'm going to link one of the 'plant available water' maps from the Mesonet here. It shows, on a numeric scale, how much water is available to plant roots at the designated depth. About the only areas that look good on this map are those that have had substantial rain in recent weeks.

Anything below 0.50 on the map indicates a need for supplemental irrigation. How much irrigation is needed depends on your soil and your plants. I'm linking the one for a 4" soil depth, but there are other maps on the Soil Moisture portion of the OK Mesonet website for other depths like 16" and 34".

It makes sense to try to keep trees alive because if you lose them it takes a lot of money and a lot of years to grow replacements. Lawns, shrubs, groundcovers and perennials can be replaced more easily than trees and grow more quickly once replanted so if I had to choose between watering the trees versus watering everything else, I'd water the trees and let the other stuff die.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: 4