good morning Dawn

It's cold here, in Iowa City, Iowa. Darn cold. Not to dry, cause it rained already since I am here.

We are looking forward to a balmy warm 38ð. LOL

I miserably failed in my clothes selection. Should have brought more warm stuff, and of course, long johns. Thank goodness my daughter has extra long johns. :)

I am planning on driving south on Wednesday, and bringing some of her potted plants with me, to overwinter them under lights at my house.

Now, being here, and so cold, I feel like I really shouldn't whine for the Oklahoma temperatures in November.

Moni
PS, hoping you get more rain!

G'Morning Dawn, glad to hear you are getting rain !!!!!
It was misting when I got up at 7, then a clap of thunder
and then rain. Its still coming down and may get enough
to help the pastures and ponds again. I played in my
garden yest. putting on more top soil where I dug up
lots of cannas, also trimmed and replanted a few flowers.
This is one of the maples in front of my house, the rain
is making it loose all its leaves.

caroline

It's a cold rainy day here! But I was grateful for the rain. I planted a bunch of clearance violas/pansies yesterday and a good rain will really help them settle in. However, I didn't appreciate the rain when it open up right on top of my head as I was getting out of the car to walk into the restaurant for lunch. I didn't have an umbrella. I never have an umbrella. Usually it doesn't matter, I have curly hair and the rain doesn't hurt/help it, so I just let it get wet. But today that meant I was wet all during lunch and the a/c was on. brrr....

Now I'm back in my nice warm office. :)

Lisa

Hi Moni!

You have my sympathy. Whenever we visited DH's family in Pennsylvania, I never took the right clothing and was always freezing cold, even in July.

More rain didn't fall, but it stayed cool, cloudy and misty. There's a tornado watch to our southwest, so I guess if that storm develops further and moves our way, we still might get a little more rain. We were in Dallas most of the day and drove home through a lot of rain but that rain stopped before we reached the Red River.

Caroline,

The maple is gorgeous. You have better color there than we have here this year. I hope the rain helped your pastures and ponds.

Our pastures are still so dry and our ponds remain empty but eventually enough rain has to fall to start refilling them. A neighbor of ours who has a spring-fed pond says it is the lowest she has seen it in the 15 years or so that she's owned the place, and worries her spring may be on the verge of drying up.

Lisa,

I bet the rain was wonderful for the flowers you planted. Almost all my stuff froze on the night we went down to 25 degrees a couple of weeks ago, but the brugmansias in containers are still blooming. One of them, and I think it is Lemonade Twist, has 6 or 8 flowers open right now and another couple of dozen about to open. I am going to have to carry it inside before the weekend freeze, but it has handled a lot of cold weather already.

We didn't get a lot more rain, but also didn't have any grassfires today....which is a change. I think there were grassfires every day last week. Of course, the dormant grasses will dry out quickly unless it rains again soon. Still, any rain is a good thing and this rain was a fairly slow soaking rain so the ground is not quite hard-as-a-rock now.

Dawn

Dawn, I was just looking at the difference in your rainfall and ours on Mesonet. You only need about 3 and a half feet to catch up. LOL

It certainly shows the diversity in Oklahoma gardening, doesn't it?

Yes, it does. Believe it or not, there are years that our rainfall is in the range of 34" to 45". Unfortunately, this is not one of them.

If we were dry all of the time, I'd adapt my gardening practices accordingly. Here, though, when I start planting in Jan. or Feb., I have no way of knowing if it is going to be a year with 18" or 19" of rainfall, or a year with 48".....and that is what makes it hard.

I did notice today that a couple more 'local' ponds have dried up, and at least one of them I've never seen dry up before.

We do have a burn ban in effect now, after a week/weekend of horrendous grassfires, so maybe the situation will improve a little.

Dallas-Fort Worth had a great rain yesterday and overnight. I think they recorded 3.9" at the airport. And, of course, there were scattered power outages and flooding. It would have been worth it, though, to have that kind of rain!

Dawn