It is time for us to panic. One of our apple trees leaves are all drying up. I have been watering but not enough. Will get dripper hoses. And no matter how much we water our plants with a sprinkler system things are not going well. Back to hand watering. Could use soaker hoses in my garden too but too big of an area.

Jessaka,

No, don't panic. It won't help. : )

Your trees likely are drying up because of drought stress. Assuming they have received an inch or two of water a month, they should be fine long-term. (I am assuming the tree was not planted in the last year.)

If the trees are otherwise healthy, then the drying up of the leaves is a part of the process they will go through in order to survive. At a certain point, severely drought-stressed trees will drop their leaves and go dormant. That can be a good thing because while they're dormant, they lose less moisture through transpiration.

We've had several rounds of drought-induced dormancy of trees during the growing season here at our place since we moved here in 1999. I believe they occurred in 2003 and 2005-2006 for sure, and maybe in 2008 as well. The trees in our landscape that went dormant, leafed back out (and bloomed) in the fall when rain returned. Some of the native trees in the woods did not survive, but then they had no irrigation whatsoever so had to survive only on rainfall.

I had watered the trees in our landscape during those years too, but as you've no doubt noticed by now, once the drought reaches a certain point, you cannot water enough to prevent drought-induced dormancy.

Here in southcentral OK, so far the only trees I've seen actually dropping leaves are some of the native elms and sycamores. However, many other trees are looking crispy, including our irrigated plum trees and magnolias.

We are starting to see drought-related complications here in southcentral OK (and northcentral Texas), like major water lines breaking and entire cities or portions of cities being without water for a day or two. The longer the current dry conditions continue, the more of that we'll see.

We need rain and we need it in the worst possible way. So far, the drought-plagued parts of the state are only in the 'abnormally dry' or 'moderate drought' levels. Although our trees are suffering now, just wait until we hit 'severe drought' or 'exceptional drought'.

How dry is the ground? If your Keetch-Byram Drought Index number for your county is over 600 (your county's is and so is our county's, among many others) that means the soil is so dry that even the compost/humus/duff layers in the soil can and will burn and so will underground tree roots.

It is starting to look like a long fall/winter and we haven't even started fall yet.

Dawn

dawn, i water everything every third day for 2 to 3 hours, but on the 3rd or even the next day the ground is dry in a lot of areas. i have watered the trees on a low hose for 3 hours every other day but it didn't work. today we are getting a drip system for the fruit trees. our water bill may go high, but i am tired of losing things. can't keep even the forest damp enough. i lost both form flowers i bought. i am going to take to handwatering in the mornings, every morning, check everything.

so instead of foam flowers for a creeping plant, i am going to hunt me up some virginia creeper. i love it anyway, and it doesn't take over like euonymus, which i have been busy trying to get rid of so i could plant foam flowers.

Jessaka,

The kind of drought you're having this year is working against you and you may have plants either going dormant or dying on you no matter how much you water and no matter how high the water bill goes. It is almost impossible to water your plants enough when the natural soil moisture levels are so low. I speak from experience, having lost many plants in the droughts of 2003, 2005-2006 and 2008-2009 in southern OK despite having a water bill that was shockingly high. Sometimes the best you can hope for is to keep the ground watered enough so that your building foundations don't crack (if you have clay soil that cracks and shifts) and keeping tree roots wet enough that the tree will ultimately survive, despite going dormant and losing its leaves.

How dry is it her in our fine state? In unirrigated areas in much of OK (especially eastern and southeastern OK), the soil moisture levels are so low that humus and compost in the soil will burn and so will underground tree roots. In conditions like that, water from the average homeowner's hose doesn't go very far even with heavy watering.

It is dry enough here in southern OK that the Virginia Creeper in some ares is browning and dropping leaves and going dormant, although in irrigated parts of our landscape it still has some green. It is one of the most drought-tolerant plants I have and it is not very happy right now, and your area is drier than mine. Still, Virginia creeper will bounce back better than some other plants.

Hang in there. One thing I know from experience is that drought doesn't last forever. However, sometimes it can last a really long time. Three years after the 2005-2006 drought, some ranchers in Carter County (one county north of me) still had dry creek beds that had not recovered and filled with water again, even though 2007 had been a very wet year with prolonged river flooding. Some of our natural springs here also dried up in the 2005-2006 drought and some of them never came back again, although 2 of them did. One of our ponds was spring-fed so when it permanently lost its spring it ceased being a year-round pond and now it only holds water in the rainy season, when there is a rainy season.

One of my least favorite things about drought is that it takes a flood to end a drought most years. The flood part isn't fun, but it sure is nice to look out and see water and greenness again....NOT that I'm wishing a flood upon you by any means.

Dawn

this is so sad. many of my herbs grew great in drought tolerant areas of california, so maybe they will make it. i hope we don't have a 3 year drought. it is also like throwing money down the tube when your plants die. in the end it may be cheaper to buy plants whent he drought is over with.

I've had several herbs that have lived for the last 3 or 4 years here die out now. Makes me very sad too. I won't have thyme for my Turkey dinners this fall unless I buy it at the grocery store.

Dawn, what's your opinion on the affect of this drought with the insect population? Specifically, I'm wondering if the hoppers will be worse or better next year after all this. I'm considering the recommendation on another thread of using Neem Oil to at least try to ward off problems.

Paula

Jessaka, Even in most drought years my herbs survive as long as I water them once or twice a month. It just depends....if your soil can hold enough water to keep them happy, they'll live even if they look sort of puny and sad. They bounce back well when higher moisture levels return. They are in improved clay so it both drains fairly well and holds moisture fairly well. In our one area that has sandy soil, I generally cannot keep herbs alive in moderate (or worse) drought because the sand drains too quickly.

Paula, I'm sorry you lost your herbs. It has been an awful summer and I don't know how much relief autumn will bring in terms of rainfall.

With the grasshoppers, I know Barbara used neem and it worked for her. However, I don't use it in my garden and likely never will.

Although generally neem will not kill beneficials (which are mostly carnivores) in the same way it will kill pest insects (which are mostly herbivores), it will smother and kill any beneficials in the garden at the time it is sprayed if it gets on them. Since I have worked so hard for 12 years to build up a good population of beneficials I just won't spray anything that will harm them. I'd rather lose plants to grasshoppers than set back the beneficial population because a 'disturbed' beneficial insect population can take several years to recover. Because I have a good population of beneficials, I haven't sprayed any pesticide in the garden this summer...not even spinosad. We have had a lot of pests, but if I am patient, the beneficials take care of most of them and I handpick or vacuum up the rest. (Not a single hornworm this year!)

We have about 12-15 grasshoppers per square yard in our pastures, but somewhat smaller numbers in the mowed lawns, shrub and flower beds, and veggie gardens. That sort of infestation normally results in massive damage. Am I seeing massive damage? Well, I saw it during the last 2 weeks of July and the first two weeks of August when the population was probably at its peak, as was the heat. Since then, I really haven't seen further plant damage except of the most minor kind (holes in leaves) even though new hoppers seem to be hatching out weekly. I think the birds and the resident population of Noseuma locuste is taking out a fair number of the hoppers because even though I'm seeing more small ones, I'm seeing steadily decreasing numbers of large ones, and the large ones I see aren't feeding on my garden.

Maybe I'd feel compelled to try harder to kill them if I was continuing to see major plant damage, but I'm not.

Grasshopper populations cycle up and down, so there's no way to know if this is the peak year (I think it is) and if we'll see ever-decreasing numbers the next 2 or 3 years or if next year will be the peak year. We'll know more after APHIS finishes their fall grasshopper counts and publishes their numbers in the fall. If this is not the peak year, then, yes, I have serious concerns about next year. If this is the peak, I don't think they'll do nearly as much damage next year as this year.

Spraying anything (ranchers use stuff like Dimlin or sevin and some other registered pesticides homeowners cannot and should not use) for grasshoppers is a temporary fix. Grasshoppers are migratory. If you are in a rural or semi-rural area, you can spray your garden weekly with Sevin or neem and still have more hoppers move in within days of each spray date. It just depends on what kinds of fields surround you and on how green they are. Grasshoppers actually prefer grassland/range and really won't harm a garden too much most years.

Some days I can be outside and walk through the garden and pasture and yard and see relatively few hoppers, and then a few hours later, a new bunch flies in and they are everywhere. All migratory insects like hoppers and army worms are hard to control since more keep coming and coming and coming.

Blister beetles are showing up now in small numbers and I welcome them because they eat grasshopper eggs.

In a bad grasshopper year, I almost always know it will be bad by February because I'll start seeing hoppers that early here. (2010 was an exception, perhaps because of all the cold and the snow.) So, if I am seeing an early hatch next year, I'll stock up on Nosema locuste and use it early and often. During the bad grasshopper years in the early 2000s, I put it out three years in a row and had relatively low damage then for another 4 or 5 years.

Sitting here in a very rural area surrounded by thousands of acres of rangeland interspersed with hickory-oak woodlands, I know that I'll always have a gazillion insects. So, my goal is never to wipe out the entire population of anything (well, OK, would like to wipe out the whole population of stinkbugs snd squash bugs and squash vine borers, but it ain't gonna happen) but rather to maintain a healthy ecosystem so that the good bugs (and good fungi and good bacteria) help control the bad bugs so that no one single insect becomes too dominant.

Some people garden organically exactly the same way they garden chemically, except their poisons of choice are natural instead of synthetic in origin. I try not to do that and I don't know what to call the form of gardening I do because it isn't organic gardening in that sense. Instead I just try to focus on building healthy soil and atttracting/maintaining beneficials instead of trying to poison undesirable pests. Some people refer to it as sustainable gardening, although I think you also can garden sustainably while using natural bio-insecticides. Some people call it 'beyond organic'. I guess I'd call it mostly no-kill, no-till gardening. I know God made every creature for a purpose and every creature has a place in the food web, so I just try to 'let them be'. It probably hurts my harvest a bit, but I always have plenty of everything to eat, dehydrate, can, freeze and give away, so I can tolerate a certain level of pest damage.

Would I spray anything now in the hopes it would kill mature grasshoppers so they can't lay eggs for next year? No. I can't kill them all, more will keep coming and the ones that keep coming will keep laying eggs. However, I'll be ready to use Nosema locuste in the late winter/early spring if needed. It really has worked well enough for me in most years. Sometimes I think it didn't work because I have hoppers all over. Then, I'll visit with a neighboring gardener or rancher or two and find they have many more hoppers and vastly more hopper damage than we do, and I'll realize the Nosema locuste did work after all because it greatly reduced our numbers relative to other folks' numbers.

Do I want to peacefully co-exist with the grasshoppers. Not exacly. Honestly, I wish they weren't here. But spraying to kill them doesn't fit in with my 'interfere as little as possible' philosophy, so I don't. How can my natural predators (birds, etc.) work to control the hoppers if I don't give them a chance to do it?

You should do whatever makes you happy or whatever you feel comfortable with. My way of doing it isn't for everyone as I have a high tolerance for garden pests and am willing to let Mother Nature work the way she's supposed to.

Dawn

Dawn, they are calling it a "flash drought" up here. We had 14 plus inches of rain in May/June and then nothing since.

Lisa

Lisa,

Well, isn't that something! You know, whoever scheduled y'all's weather up there in central OK did it backwards. You need the flood last, not first, to restore life to your landscape after the drought. : )

Don't you wish you had all the water back that ran off when y'all flooded back in....was it June?

We were in Texas this morning and Tarrant County (Fort Worth) and Denton County (Denton and Lewisville) were much drier than we are here. The unirrigated fields there are as brown and dry as they would be in Dec. or Jan. after several heavy frosts and many native trees in unirrigated areas are dropping leaves.

It rained on us in Texas though....for about 20 seconds when we were in Southlake and then for about 15 minutes in Grapevine.

I hope some of that Texas rain makes it up here to Oklahoma. We do have clouds here, and the occasional thunder, but not a drop of anything wet has fallen.

Dawn

We have so many trees here look like they're dying. Leaves are all over and it looks like we're deep into fall already. Of course, they may just be faking it and conserving their strength.

Grasshoppers are still insane here! Like Dawn, though, they're not really doing too much damage. What IS doing damage one what is left living are cucumber beetles. I have never seen so many!!!! I can't even walk in the garden anymore. They are so thick, I can't breathe as they fly into my face. I thought the grasshoppers were bad but these cuke beetles are ten times as thick.

Diane

Diane,

You must have 'my' cucumber beetles because for some odd reason we don't have very many (hardly any at all) this year. You don't have to send them back though, 'cause I don't want them. : )

We should be at the point that all insect damage is dropping as we move into fall, although there's not a money-back guarantee attached to that statement.

I've never had so many grasshoppers doing so little damage. I'm not complaining though because they did way too much damage in late July and early August. I guess it averages out.

Hope y'all are well and am sure you're busy preparing for the big move.

Dawn