Game bird, One of the local citizens who lives here (a Love County native and rancher herself) has family in south-central Texas. Those family members also are ranchers, and they are in desperate shape. Down there in south Texas, in some places there's as much cactus as there is prairie grass and mesquite trees. Since January, they've been burning the spines off the cactus and feeding them to te cattle. The cactus are sort of a "last resort" for cattle feed. There's no grass growing. There's no hay left. They also have been "importing" hay from other states that are having more normal conditions. The south Texas ranchers are buying so much hay they risk going broke. It is a horrible situation and I feel for them. As we all know from seeing it happen here in recent years, the next step is a very bitter pill for ranchers to swallow.....having to sell off their herds once they no longer can afford to feed them. I don't know how the ranchers and farmers are hanging in there as long as they have thus far. I think you have to be very tough to ranch in the Great Plains where the weather can be so fickle and cruel. Thinking about the folks down there makes me feel like we are a lot better off in most parts of OK than we think we are. At least we've mostly had decent rainfall in the last several months. Also, I think it is easy for us to forget that much of Oklahoma was in the worst drought stage (D-4, Exceptional Drought), back in the 2005-2006 time frame too. Even worse? We're probably only six rain-free months from being there again. Luckily, we seldom go an entire six months without rain.....it only seems like we do! Dawn

Paula, We have a resident deer herd here that were living deep in the woods when we bought the property. We've done our best to peacefully coexist with them. Of course, we've had to fence the veggie garden to keep them out, and we do feed them in the winter. Last July, during horrible drought, one of the does begin bringing her twin fawns to the yard to look for food while they were tiny. I started putting out deer corn for the three of them, and other things...like melons, okra and fresh corn as well. They always 'scavenged' around the back compost pile for kitchen scraps, so I just started putting the kitchen scraps on the ground beside the compost pile. Watching the twin fawns grow up has been twice as fun as watching a lone fawn grow. We saw them almost daily, and sometimes twice a day, all winter and in early spring. They still come check out the compost pile for yummy goodies once or twice a week. Until about a month ago, the doe kept coming back with them, but I havn't seen her lately. We aren't getting the rounds of rain y'all are getting, so we're having the opposite problems....hot, dry issues like hordes of grasshoppers, spider mites, stink bugs, sunscald, dry cracking clay ground, etc. Still, we have better mid-level soil moisture levels now than we normally do in August, and we had dew a couple of days earlier in the week, but now it is apparently too dry here for that. I have begun seriously yanking out declining spring/summer plants and replacing them with fall garden plants this last week or two. It was almost a relief to take out the old, tired squash, zucchini, watermelom and muskmelon vines. I already had new muskmelon vines in the ground for fall since sometime in late June or early July so pulling out the old melon vines wasn't that hard. I should have ripe fall muskmelons by late August. The new squash, zucchini and cucumber plants should be producing before the end of September. I took out a lot of tired tomato plants, kept some of the old ones as is and pruned back others pretty hard to stimulate new growth. I don't blame the spring plants for being tired and worn out, diseased and pest-infested. It's been a long summer and they've used up a lot of energy. I love the healthy green appearance of the fall plants too. At least we're getting a break from the hot August temperatures. Even though our Heat Index was 103, our high temp was only about 92 or so, and for August that's fairly mild. I have to admit I'm looking forward to September. Most years, my pest and disease issues just go away in September. Dawn

Keith, We're in the yellow shaded area too and have struggled to keep a few things happy, and have the huge water bills to prove it. However, in at least 3 of the years since we've lived here, our area has made it all the way to the dark brownish area known as "Exceptional Drought", so I don't scare easily any more. We were 105 yesterday, and unless it has warmed up again outside, we hit 86 before the cold front came through and have been around 83 ever since. It feels wonderful! My pepper plants wilted badly yesterday, so I was up early and gave them 1/2" of water. It wasn't much, but I wanted them to have something in case the rain missed us. So far today, we've had about 1/2" of rain, so I think the peppers will bounce back. I've had new fruitset on some tomato plants too, and the peppers never stopped setting fruit, but most of the rest of my garden is toast. In addition to the peppers and tomatoes, we still have sweet potatoes (20 varieties I'm trialing for Gary), okra and green beans producing, I haven't planted anything for fall, but I might plant some cool-season greens in September if the rains continue. I hope the SVBs and squash bugs are gone too, but I'm not sure they are. Someone I know in Texas about an hour south of the TX-OK border still has SVBs around that just took out their fall crop. Today's rain was desperately needed here. Our fire dept. fought a 10-acre grassfire on Saturday evening, a 35-acre grassfire yesterday afternoon and then a small fire in the early a.m. hours this morning. Without rain, we were about to get really busy. The half-inch we received won't make a huge difference, but it will lessen the fire danger for a couple of days. Once you're in drought, it takes a lot of rain to make a real difference though. Dawn

Chandra, I have tried for years to get our weather here in Love County to cooperate and do what the Farmer's Almanac says it will do, and with very little success. The Farmer's Almanacs, no matter which one of them you use, rely a great deal on statistical averages and also on sunspot patterns, and some years the statistics let you down, and other years it is the sunspots that don't cooperate. I don't know that any forecasting is really accurate more than a few days in advance though. What NWS forecasters can see are long-term trends based on jet-stream patterns and other data, and that's where I find their forecasts helpful. We've lived in our present location long enough now that I at least understand what conditions an "El Nino" pattern give us or what conditions a "La Nina" pattern give us, but even those patterns allow for quite a bit of variation from year to year. The U. S. Drought Monitor map I link is a reporting tool based on observed weather. Actual data observations must be submitted by Tuesday, I think, and the updated map publishes on Thursday of each week. There is a separate graphic forecast based off of it (I think it is called the Seasonal Outlook) and other info, and I'll try to find it and link it, that forecasts whether they think the drought conditions will remain the same, improve or worsen over the next few weeks. I haven't looked at the seasonal outlook at all this fall, but I bet it will show continued drought in most parts of OK and Texas and probably the rest of the south too, because this is a La Nina year and that is what happens in a La Nina. This outlook updates frequently as changing conditions affect the outlook. It isn't 100% correct either (no forecast is or ever will be), but it gives us an idea about what to expect. I read a horrible news story in a Texas paper this morning that went back over the drought/wildfire situation experienced in Texas and Oklahoma in 2005-2006 and it brought back so many horrid memories. Our tiny little volunteer fire dept. went from about 40 fire calls a year to over 240 a year during that time frame, and many of those fires required a day or two or three at the same fire scene. That drought/wildfire situation kept me off of Garden Web (I posted maybe once a month) for almost 18 months because I didn't have any time to get on the computer. All I remember is the pagers going off nonstop and us being gone all the time, never sleeping, and watering our yard like crazy to keep fire away from our house when we were away fighting other fires. The garden suffered mightily, especially after I stopped irrigating it--which is when most of it died. (The eggplants and some Livingston tomatoes survived and produced into October even after receiving no rain to speak of and no irrigation after July 1st.) While Oklahoma is not even close to being back in those conditions just yet, west Texas, western North Texas and southwest Texas already are "there". I read the fire situation reports daily and it is scarey, although the worst fires remain at least a couple hundred miles from OK. As time goes on, though, and conditions worsen, we may find ourselves having a rough spring in OK, especially with regards to spring planting and late winter/spring wildfires. I am not a writer, so haven't written a book, journal, etc. I'm just an ordinary old dirt gardener who loves to play in the dirt and then talk about it. When something goes wrong, I try to figure out why and then share what I know. That's what all of us do here...we share our experiences and our knowledge. I still learn something new here on this forum every single day. We have a remarkable bunch of experienced gardeners here and I am grateful we are able to "talk gardening" and learn from one another here. It doesn't matter how long a person has been gardening, there's a million new things to learn all the time. As Thomas Jefferson said, "Though I am an old man, I am but a young gardener", a sentiment I understand well. When we encounter gardening problems, we all put our heads together here and try to figure out a solution. I wish we all lived in the same neighborhood and could run back and forth from one landscape and garden to another and share our ideas and experiences, but since we can't, we have to rely on our "electronic conversations" and I'm so glad we have them and each other. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Drought Seasonal Outlook--latest edition