Dawn, Sorry you are having so many fires. This weather is very strange and it is very warm here also. I told you earlier about the cucumbers that came up from the ones I tossed in the back of the flowerbed. Yesterday I tore out my ornamental sweet potato vines and there was a nice big 8 inch cucumber ready to be picked. A cucumber in November?

I have a pallet of paving stones that I bought for a project last year and changed my mind. I am going to use them for another purpose, but right now they are just setting there soaking up the sun. A few inches away from them is a tomato plant about 6 or 8 inches tall. I don't know how it grew there at all because it doesn't get much sun. I guess the bricks collect so much heat during the day that it was protected from the two really cold nights we had. Almost makes me want to bring it inside and protect it since it wants to grow so badly. LOL

My grandson took out all my pepper plants for me this weekend so I can empty out all of those containers and get them put away and I still had a handful of peppers on them.

Earlier in the year we had a new roof put on our house and it extends a little further out than the old one did. I think the rain actually goes over the rain guttering on one side of the house. I have a lot of trees so leaves, twigs, blowing dirt, etc. had accumulated in these gutters (makes it's own compost up there). One day I looked up and could see "poke" growing in my rain gutter thanks to the birds planting it for me, I'm sure. As I drive around town I notice a lot of people have tall grass, and little trees growing in there gutters. It is a real tell-tale sign that your house isn't getting enough maintenance. LOL My daughter decided to crawl up there and clean out the guttering today. A little grass snake was in the gutter. I think that is very funny because I have lived here 7 years and have never seen a snake. It's like the white squirrel that lives in my neighborhood that my son has seen, but I haven't. I have seen the one that lives in my friend's back yard about half a mile from me tho. I understand that one of our Grove white squirrels made the Tulsa news the other day. They had pictures of one from Texas on the news and made such a big deal of it, that the next day someone sent them a picture of one of our "Oklahoma" white squirrels.

It looks like we are going to get a couple more nice warm days so I am going to try to spend my next few days in the yard. They are now saying the colder temps should arrive Wednesday night.

I guess it is time for us to pray for rain for you again. You have sure been "needy" this year. HeeHee. I think your county is misnamed, since it seems someone up there doesn't LOVE you. Seriously, hope you get some rain before Love county burns up.

Carol,

You know, we lived here for about 5 years before I saw a single pasture fire that burned more than a small (maybe front yard-sized) amount of land and a couple of bales of hay. I guess those must have been good rain years, because since 2005 the wildfires have been unbelievable.

I was out before sunrise setting up and turning on sprinklers, and pruning up limbs on a couple of small trees. (Part of firescaping is that all limbs be pruned up 8' above the ground so fire cannot climb up into their canopy. It is hard to do this on very small young trees that are only 8' or 10' tall themselves.) Later today, I will cut back the cannas near the house all the way down to the ground. Then, I am going to cut back all the half-frozen (top half froze, botton half didn't) four o'clocks on the north and northeast sides of the house and the ones under the pecan trees too. I'll spend the rest of the day cutting pasture grass and weedeating fencelines, edges where the forest meets the grassland, and the bar ditches. I'd rather cut it now than risk having it burn later.

I was walking the dog Saturday and noticed our trees are about as colorful and lovely as they get here in southern OK, but my neighbor's pastures are that dry, tawny-gold wheat color and I am hoping they will cut down all that dry grass before it burns. If we learned anything here at all these last few years, it is that tall dry grass burns a gazillion times faster than very short grass.

I think all of today and tomorrow will be just doing yard maintenance and clean-up, but maybe by Wed. I can get into the fenced garden and clean it out. I still have snakes in there, though, so I'd like to do that on a colder day.

I do need to clean up all my containers as well, removing the dead foliage and putting it on the compost pile, and stacking up the pots for the winter.

The white squirrels in Texas make the news every now and then. They have a couple of them on the campus of the University of North Texas at Denton and they cause quite a commotion on campus. The students feed them, take their pictures, etc. They even have a calendar of photos of "their" white squirrels that they sell to raise money for something on campus....maybe the library. Some years they have only 1 and other years there are 2 or 3. When one of the white squirrels was found dead a few years ago, they had a funeral or memorial service for it. I guess it gives the college students something unusual to be interested in while there at school. All of our squirrels here in Love County are just run-of-the-mill squirrels--no exotic white ones!

I have a small tomato plant--maybe 8" tall--in one container on the garage/barn's concrete slab. It must have reseeded from a cherry tomato growing in a larger pot nearby. I thought it would freeze when everything else did, but there it sits, lovely and green, though not blooming. At times I am tempted to put it into a larger pot and try to keep it through the winter, but I know from experience that winter tomatoes don't get enough heat to develop good flavor, so doubt it would be worth it.

A snake and trees in the roof gutter! Well, now you know why you haven't seen snakes on the ground....they are living up there in the penthouse on the roof. Personally, I'd rather NOT see snakes at all.

I have gone back and looked at our rainfall totals for all the years I could find them, and all I can say about our rainfall here is that it see-saws erratically, from 36" to about 40" in a good year and then from 19" to 24" in a bad year. This is a bad year, but it actually started in August 2007, so it is also a long year.

Some long-time residents here who are in their 80s and 90s tell me Love County used to regularly get annual rainfall totals in the 40s and 50s, but it began changing in the 1970s or so and the years keep getting drier. I think there was one year in the mid-1990s when we had over 50" of rain here, but that seems long ago.

When we first moved here, everyone raised something: wheat, pecans, peanuts, watermelons, muskmelons, etc. And, in just the 10 years we've been here, most of those crops have been discontinued. For a long time, though, many of the ranchers raised winter wheat, planting it in late August to late September and counting on the autumn and winter rains to make it grow. If they have cattle, they can graze the cattle on it for part of the winter, then pull the cattle off of it in spring, let the wheat head up and harvest it in May/June. Since 2005, there's less and less wheat planted every year, and an article in the Marietta Monitor a few weeks ago said almost nobody was planting wheat this year---input costs are too high, and with no rain falling, there's no guarantee the wheat would grow. Our main crop around here anymore is just native hay which hasn't done all that well in this rain-challenged year.

For weeks now, one of our local TV weather guys has repeatedly referred to our "desert-like weather conditions" and it is the most accurate description possible. We're having very cool nights, very hot days, and very dry air with low humidity. Even when cold fronts come through, all they bring us is wind and cool, dry air. We need some warm fronts from the south with warmer, moist, humid air.

Oh, well, there's always the hope that next year will be better. In the meantime, all we can do is try to keep the place from burning down.

Dawn

I was in Carter County a couple of weeks ago and some of my family members were really worried about the wheat crop they already had in the ground, and doing some grumbling about the cost of fertilizer this year. I didn't realize that commercial fertilizer had become so costly.

Yeh, I should have taken a picture of my rain gutter and its little seedlings growing. This neighborhood once had people that loved "poke salet", I guess, because a couple of us have pulled and cut great quantities of it from our garden and flower beds. It makes those nasty berries in the fall and the birds carry them everywhere. I don't do poke.

The little acorns fall and roll down the roof. If a seed gets trapped, it doesn't take long for it to sprout with our rainfall. I only have guttering on one small portion of my house, and I just don't ever think about cleaning it out until I see something growing in it. So between falling acorns and walnuts, and the birds planting poke, I am always pulling up seedlings. Guess I need to clean those gutters more often. LOL

I think I have a new leaf collection system. My neighbor across the street and his wife spent most of a day raking, chopping and bagging leaves. I gave them 10 big 55 gallon size bags to put them in. After they are bagged, they bring them back to my yard so I can compost them. Their yard looked really nice but mine is still covered with leaves. They have trees also but a lot of their leaves come from my trees. It has been two days and their yard is covered in leaves again. I told my other neighbor that I had found the secret........just let mine blow over there and they will come back bagged. HeeHee

I am afraid that my yard and garden endeavors have suffered this year because I have always had a project going. I told my neighbor today that I had adopted the Army way, "If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, paint it." I feel like I have painted all summer.

Some of the painting is caused by the fact that I am cheap. A friend, who is a builder, gave me a ton of trim that had been removed from another house. Since I needed to trim out doorways and put baseboard in every room of the bunkhouse and it cost $7 per board, I was happy to get it free. It was stained this very dark color, and I was going with white. I measured, cut and mitered, primed and painted (many coats) before I every nailed it in. I have all of the doors trimmed out, but the baseboard only gets nailed in after I get the walls painted, so I have little stacks of finished and fitted baseboard in every unfinished place. The guy that gave me the molding was over the other day and looked at the doorways and some shelving I had added and told my husband that he not only got a cook and a gardener, but a carpenter too. Now if I could just find someone to clean house, maybe I could cover everything. I would much rather build a house than clean one.............but I need to go cook dinner now.

Carol,

I hadn't realized that commercial chemical fertilizer costs had risen greatly either, but then I don't buy it so there's no reason I would know what it costs. Of course, chemical fertizilizers are commonly derived from petroleum products, so I guess their cost went up accordingly this year.

I saw some poke salet along a fenceline last week while walking the dog. I've never seen it there before, but I bet the birds 'planted' it there by the fence. The foliage looked pretty ragged, dry and sad but the berries looked good. We have some scattered about our property but not in huge amounts.

I like your leaf collection system. Hey...whatever works! I know lots of organic gardeners who drive around and pick up all the bags of leaves that people put out curbside.

You certainly are talented! I am not even close to being a carpenter. It sounds like you've had a busy summer. Today I have been a mower, and tomorrow I will be a weedeater. LOL Once I get all the tall stuff cut down very short, then I won't worry so much about wildfire coming at us from the south, which is the route a fire would most likely take to get to us.

We're expecting 30 m.p.h. winds tomorrow, so I guess I'll run the soaker hoses instead of the sprinklers. I think I have made a tiny bit of progress in closing up the cracks in the ground that are nearest the house. And, after cutting down 3' to 4' tall pasture grasses that were dormant or dead, brown and dry, I found a few short tufts of green winter grasss. Now, if only some rain would fall and encourage that green stuff to grow a little.

The Ardmoreite said yesterday's 88 degree high was a record for Ardmore on that date, and I bet it was a record here in Marietta too. (Won't know, I guess, until the Marietta Monitor comes out on Friday.) The frogs are croaking in the lily pond and it sure doesn't feel like November out there. I guess that might change on Wed.

Dawn

When we were living in southern Oklahoma we had a guy setting fires and there would be several at the same time. I think they caught him and sent him away tho. I hope so because I hate arson. It is so meaningless. They have to be a little crazy to want to start a grass fire.

I took out my cannas today and although the leaves had turned brown, the stems were still very green. We have never had a fire problem and I hope we never do because the houses are really close together in a lot of these lake neighborhoods. A house burned across the inlet from us a year or two ago, but it didn't spread. The fire department did a good job and it wasn't an easy area to get to. Although it is only a few yards across the inlet, it is much harder to get to by road than our houses are. We have rural fire departments and we pay an annual membership fee to the department. I think it is $60 a year

I am sure they really appreciate having your family in Love County since you all three contribute so much time and effort to the fire department, and fire is such a threat in those dry grasslands.

Carol,

There are arsonists at work and I do not understand their mentality. I think the wildfires at the northern end of Love County (right at the Carter-Love county line) the last three Sunday afternoons all were arson, and I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Firefighting is very much a family activity here in Love County. Just about every one of our 14 fire depts. has multiple members from at least one family and sometimes from more than one family. If we don't protect our buildings and land, who will?

I never used to worry about grasssfire/wildfire that much until the town of Ringgold, Texas, burned down in wind-driven wildfire in about 15 minutes on Jan. 1, 2006. (Thackerville had narrowly avoided the same fate on the Sunday after Thanksgiving just a few weeks before.) Now, as a gardener and a landowner, I am much more aware of the risk. I practice firescaping in my landscaping to a certain extent, although not as intensely as I would if I lived in the dry parts of southern California, for example.

As Ringgold burned across the river from Love County, I watered around our buildings like a maniac and monitored the fire radio traffic with a growing sense of horror. As they evacuated the larger town of Nocona, I started trying to figure out how I could evacuate all our animals if the fire jumped the river. (It didn't.) I was home alone because DH and DS were out fighting other fires in Love County. My heart was breaking for the folks in Ringgold and the surrounding area and, at the same time, I was terrified they wouldn't be able to stop that wall of fire before it got to Oklahoma. (They did stop it.) So, when fire weather watches are issued, I am especially watchful and alert to the possibility of fast-moving wildfire.

I mowed and mowed and mowed yesterday, trying to remove as much dormant fire fuel as possible. Early this morning the deer came tiptoeing across the freshly mowed pasture and seemed freaked out by the sudden disappearance of all the 'cover' they formerly used to stay more-or-less undetected. I'd rather leave the pasture plants tall and let them reseed naturally, but cannot afford the fire risk. At least maybe the mowing should help scatter the goldenrod and liatris seedheads and maybe we'll have more of both blooming next year.

And, even though the gardener and landscaper in me absolutely does not want for wildfire to touch the civilized portion of our land, I'd love to have it burn through the 10 or so wooded acres and clear out a lot of the underbrush. We can't do a controlled burn here because the homes to our west and north would be too vulnerable should a prescribed burn on our land get out of control. I try to clear undergrowth and brush in the woods every year or two, but there's too much of it and not enough of me!

Yesterday's weather was a lot better--only 81 degrees and I think the humidity didn't go any lower than the 30s, so it felt pretty decent when I was working in the yard.

I'm praying for rain and thinking we might actually have a chance of getting some on Wed. night. I guess today is the last good, hot weather for a while. I am sort of dreading tomorrow's high winds, but our county is not in the Fire Weather Watch area, so we should be OK here.

Dawn

Clearing underbrush is such a big job, but makes such a huge difference. When I was a teenager, I lived on Hiway 70 just west of Lone Grove. My Dad was sick and died of cancer while we lived there. I think I not only wanted the area to look good, but I wanted something to keep me busy. We were living in a big house that my brother-in-law had bought in Ardmore and moved to Lone Grove.

Probably no one who reads this will remember, but at the corner where Hiway 70 meets Commerce they took a lot of nice big houses out to build that intersection as it now is. Most of them had to be cut in half to be moved and I know of at least two that were moved to Lone Grove. (Yes, I am old enough to remember pre-four lane highway.)

Anyway, it was a nice big old home placed in the corner of about 80 acres, I think. At any rate, I had lots of area to ride the horse, pick up pecans, and take long walks, but I didn't want the area around the house to look so wild. I had nothing but hand tools so all I could do was cut the brush at ground level and hope it died out. I cleared the area from the house to the creek and just left the larger trees. I didn't know enough about trees to be selective about what stayed and what went, so basicly if it was big it got to stay.

After my Dad's death, we moved to a smaller house, and a few years later I went away to school and didn't go back. I remember thinking what a hard job that was and wondering if the next people who lived there would let it grow back, since my brother-in-law had always kept it as rent house.

A couple of years ago, I drove by and thought of those times and that the area still looks pretty good. Not as much like a park as I had it looking, but still doesn't have a lot of underbrush. It was kind of nice to think after so many years that it still looked OK.

I am very aware of fire dangers and my outdoor area could use some changes right now. When my DH was in the Air Force, we lived in base housing several times, and the entire family had to attend fire training once a year. My kids always thought it was kind of fun so they didn't mind going. I thought it was great because it made them more aware. Other people laugh at me, but my children understand, when I always unplug the toaster after use. At the base housing lectures, they said that it was the 2nd most common appliance fire in base housing, with the first being an iron of course. They taught us to unplug it after use so my kids always did that. I rarely use the toaster anymore, but if I decide to, I would have to plug it in, because I still follow that rule. The other day I was putting some small appliance in the bunkhouse and decided I could control it out there, by plugging them into a powerstrip and keeping it turned off when not in use. Guess that fire training is still with me. LOL

In our area, lots are small so a fire would be a big issue. We have two lots so we are OK to the south, the road is in front of the house and my garden behind, so those three sides are not bad. Our lots are kind of pie shaped so although the front of the house next door is not close to mine, the back is. The back corners of our houses are probably only 12 feet apart. We have huge trees and almost everyone keeps the lower branches pruned off, so it is a long way up to the first limbs. Any house fire would certainly threaten the neighborhood though.

We still have 20 acres down in Carter County that is completely wooded and no one every goes to. It has never had the brush cleared. About 30 years ago someone cleared land just next to ours. Well, I should say he cleared a hole in the wooded area, and left the rest and we thought some of it might have been ours. We were in Colorado at the time. Seems he forgot that they search for marjuana patches by plane. He got caught.