It sure has been a hard year for you there. I hope that you have a rainy autumn and winter that will restore moisture to your area's parched soil. It sure will take a lot of rain to get things back to normal there. The kind of rain deficit you've experienced is not easy to overcome.

Last autumn and winter we had good rainfall beginning in September and lasting roughly through April, which helped our land recover from last year's drought and also has kept us in the lower drought categories all summer. Last year we were mostly in Exceptional and Extreme Drought, and this year we were mostly in Severe or Moderate Drought with only a few weeks at Extreme. I cannot imagine what it would have been like for us here this summer if we hadn't had the really good rain in fall and winter, and through part of spring. We have had a roller coaster summer, where several weeks of no rain will be followed by a day or two of good rainfall. We have lost a lot of trees in the woods that seemed to survive last year's drought and leafed out just fine, and then began dying. This type of delayed death from drought is common so I was prepared for it, but didn't like seeing it nevertheless.

Last year we had about 23" of rain for the entire year (roughly 12" had fallen by the end of August), and this year we've already had that much, so if we have good autumn rain, we may end up with an almost-normal year, even though the rain hasn't fallen at the normal times. For us, a normal year would be about 38-39". I cannot imagine it is possible for enough rain to fall at your house from Sept.-Dec. to get y'all back near your average annual rainfall for 2012. Surely 2013 will be better.

With September starting out so hot, I feel like the recent rainfall we did have will evaporate pretty quickly and that is discouraging, so about all we can do is hope for more rain to fall soon.

How big is the hot room you're going to keep heated this winter?

Dawn

Dawn, the hot room is only 8x8 ft. The entire greenhouse is 16 by 24 and the hot room is built into the southwest corner. The 8x8 ft of northwest corner is storage. Then the heated and lighted seedstarting benches and the potting bench are in the 8x16 ft area at the back of the building with a pathway between them. The door is on the south side onto a 4x8 ft paving-covered area, which will hopefully act as a heat sink. The inground beds that produced so well last year are on the southeast side in the remaining 12x8 area. It seemed plenty big when we built it, but I've been thinking of building a hoophouse of arched cattle panels covered with plastic sheeting to raise even more winter greens. Maybe next fall. This year have the two 4x4 screen-covered frames that we will plastic later.

Dorothy,

I think it is neat that you will have the heated room to overwinter some cucumbers and tomatoes without having to heat the whole thing.

I've already concluded my greenhouse is too small. It is 12' x 24'. But, based on past history, I'll probably have to whine for a few years before we build another one. It will have to be a separate one as opposed to an extension because this one already has stuff on all 4 sides of it that we won't want to move.

I know Tim knows in his heart that we will be building another greenhouse at some point in time because even as we were finishing uo this one, he kept thinking of improvements and saying "Next time I want to ....." or "when we build the next one, we need to....". I just hope we build the next one before we get too much older and forget what all his great ideas for the next one are.

Dawn

Dorothy,

I think it is neat that you will have the heated room to overwinter some cucumbers and tomatoes without having to heat the whole thing.

I've already concluded my greenhouse is too small. It is 12' x 24'. But, based on past history, I'll probably have to whine for a few years before we build another one. It will have to be a separate one as opposed to an extension because this one already has stuff on all 4 sides of it that we won't want to move.

I know Tim knows in his heart that we will be building another greenhouse at some point in time because even as we were finishing uo this one, he kept thinking of improvements and saying "Next time I want to ....." or "when we build the next one, we need to....". I just hope we build the next one before we get too much older and forget what all his great ideas for the next one are.

Dawn

The average rainfall for Delaware County is 46.48, and we are just under 26 inches, so I doubt that we will come close to our average this year. We could get another 10 inches but I doubt that we will get 20.

We did benefit from Isaac with some good slow rainfall over a two day period. Our early storm that tried to blow our neighborhood away had lots of rain in it, that would not have been measured at the Mesonet station, so we have probably had more rainfall than has been reported by the Mesonet. I don't have a rain gauge, and finally remembered to look for one, and they were out of stock at Lowe's. I can't seem to keep a rain gauge. I had two break last winter because they would get a little water in them which I would forget to empty and they would freeze and break.

Dorothy, I plan to grow some things under tunnels this winter. I was amazed that I could keep pepper plants alive until after Thanksgiving last year, so I think we should be able to keep hardy crops going all winter unless we just have a terrible winter. I have ordered greenhouse plastic to go over low tunnels so I can experiment, and it should be here by the end of the week.

Cattle panels have some pretty sharp places on the edges and I would be afraid that they would poke through the plastic unless the long sides were covered on the edge. I have a conduit bender that makes arches out of 10 foot lengths of conduit and bends them to four foot widths. I used the arches this year with floating row cover over them, but will also use them this winter with plastic. We could sure arrange to make you some hoops before next Fall if you want some. It can use three different sizes of conduit, but I have found the 1/2 inch is plenty strong and it is very cheap. I love cattle panels, but I use them for trellis.

I had planned to have lots of things ready for winter but it has just been too hot this summer to work on any projects. I still have things growing in my garden, but only because I watered enough to keep them alive. Now that we have had rain, everything is growing good. I am getting more squash now than I did in the summer.

I would like to have a greenhouse but I am just not prepared to start another project until some of the others are finished. It would really be nice to be able to start transplants and not have to move them in and out so many times.

I need to get another rain gauge also. I want to put in another area and compare it to the one I have been using, its hard for me to belive the readings I have been getting I have been getting this summer. I have move the rain gauge from the garden to a pole about eye level in front of the house. Although my readings are about the same as the neighbors, both our readings have been more than what Ft. Smith has been recording. (the neighbor is 1/2 mile away)

I've been awaiting the El Nino update that will advise us that an El Nino is developing and we'll have a really rainy fall and winter, but that El Nino is taking its own sweet time. If something happens, and we stay neutral or have only a very weak El Nino, I don't know that we'll see good rainfall recovery.

Carol, It is hard to imagine you or Dorothy or others in your area will get close to average annual rainfall for 2012 unless you're flooded all fall, and no one wants that. Still, we can hope y'all will get as much as possible.

When our rainfall was stuck at 12" in August 2011, I began to wonder if we'd even hit 20" for the year, which would have been about an inch over 50% of our average annual rainfall, but I felt like 20" was something realistic to hope for. We had a wet fall last year and ended up with 23", for 2011 but that still was 15" below average so we started 2012 too dry as it was.

Amazingly, as dry as last year was here, it wasn't even our worst year since we moved here. Our worst year was 2003, when we had less than 19" of rain. I remember that year well. I made the mistake in spring of continuing to think that rain surely would fall "any day now", and it didn't. I wasn't watering as much in early spring as I should have been and my plants stalled. I learned from that lesson, and no longer wait for the expected spring rains to fall. I just irrigate if they aren't falling.

We go through lots of rain gauges too. I try to remember to bring them in before they freeze and break, but don't always succeed. One of these days I am going to buy a really good one. We have had the best luck with putting one on a wooden post, so Tim cannot run over it with the lawn mower or shatter it with the weed eater, a common fate of previous rain gauges.

I have kept peppers alive in pots all winter just by dragging them into the garage on a few cold nights. They produced all winter, but the fruit that set in December and January was very slow to grow and ripen. I think that with pots in the greenhouse, the fruit will grow and ripen faster. I intend to find out this winter, but I am still undecided about whether to heat the greenhouse on cold nights or just carry the pot of peppers to the well-insulated garage.

I have big plans for a fall and winter garden, but they are stalled while this heat wave drags on. After the cooldown hits, I am going to sow seeds of all kinds of kale, collards, lettuce, Swiss chard,radishes, spinach, cool-season herbs, beets, etc. I'll put the floating row cover over the hoops over those beds when really cold weather threatens. I also have two kinds of cabbage and one kind of broccoli growing in paper cups and ready to go in the ground as soon as the heat breaks. I was hoping I'd get them in the ground this week, but here we are still waiting for cooler weather....I have them where they get morning sun and afternoon shade right now and they still are not very happy.

You'll love having a greenhouse in the winter. I cannot believe how much it simplified seed-starting this past spring. I sure didn't miss carrying all those flats of plants in and out when cold nights threatened, especially since my lighted plant shelves are upstairs in the weight room. I cannot even begin to guess how many trips I've made up and down those stairs with flats of plants in all the years since we moved here.

Larry, My rain gauge never matches the rainfall readings from town, from the NWS Co-operative weather observer in our county, or from our Mesonet station. I have noticed, though, that in most years even though our daily totals don't match, we often end up with about the same amount of total rainfall for the year. There are some exceptions. On at least three occasions I can remember, our part of the county got incredibly heavy rainfall that missed other parts of the county. On one of those occasions we got 9.25", though some other parts of our county got about 6", and on another one, we got almost 9" while other parts of the county got between 2" to nothing. We also got 12.89" once when some other parts of the county farther from the river only got half that, or even less. This year, some parts of western Love County got rain several times in the summer when we didn't, but then we got 3" last week and they didn't get nearly that much, so it seems to average out pretty evenly over time. Friends who live a mile south of us often don't get as much rain as we get and friends less than a mile north usually do. I think we are in a pretty good part of our specific county because overall we do get some good rainfall occasionally even in the worst years.

Dawn