George, Jerreth certainly is having a challenging week. It sounds like the power might make it back on before you get home. What wonderful friends y'all have.....loaning Jerreth the RV with its' generator. I'm glad Jerreth is going to be able to save the frozen food. And, putting the refrigerated food in the 5-gallon buckets was a brilliant idea. That's a long way to haul water. So, I guess the two of them are building some serious muscle tissue.....and they don't even have to drive to "the gym" to do it. I know that you are doing terrific work at the Bible Institute and you are fortunate to have a spouse who shares your faith and supports your efforts. It can't be fun to be the one who is "home alone" at this time of year with the risk of ice storms, and I admire her so much for being willing to do it. You said that this is one of the "prices" which you wish y'all didn't have to pay, and I understand that, but we don't really get to choose the price we pay or the challenges we face. I know that Jerreth will come through this challenging period just fine and I suspect she won't even "rub it in" too much that you were off in sunny Mexico doing the work of the Lord while she was here dealing with the mixed blessing of having frozen moisture fall. Look at it this way: The good news, George, is that while you are away in Mexico, all your trees got watered. The bad news is that they got iced too. I hope the rest of your trip is successful and productive and the conditions at "the home place" improve soon. Dawn

I walked home to check on the palms last night Mike- it was like an Arctic wasteland-unbelievable! Half of my G-house collapsed,it was a good thing I checked it,I think part of it had to be laying on the space heater. I turned of all the power-there is really no reason to heat with that much snow on everything. Supposed to be -12 tonight,maybe. I figure the snow will insulate everything-gotta leave it as it lays until the lows get into the teens again in a few days. This is about the time of year when I question whether I will continue with this hobby- SPRING usually helps me forget all the white stuff pretty quick- there is a lot to forget on the ground right now,I would guess 15"+ but there's no way to know exactly....... Forgot to mention,the rest of it(G-house) collapsed this morning )-:

Seedmama, See there, I really can read your mind. Now, I hope you're taking care of yourself and not wearing yourself out too much helping everyone else. You have to save some energy in case one of the next weather monsters hits y'all too. By the way, I saw your thread on 'alerts' and agreed with every word. I like it when the severe weather threads stay high on the page long enough for everyone to see them, but there are times we need follow-up info from folks who are seeing new alerts or new developments and want to share them. It seems like a fine line to walk, doesn't it? Today, I am going to keep posting new alerts as new threads for as long as I can. It might not be all that long if the storms develop here first and move north/northeast. I have watched huge amounts of moisture stream overhead from Texas, across the Red River, above and beyond us and towards all of y'all. I don't like that. I am afraid all the Gulf moisture in the air could contribute to significant storms. It is so nice that your shelter is open to your friends and neighbors. Ours is too, but it is just one of those little in-ground ones that is about 6' x 8' so it doesn't hold huge numbers of people. I've already touched base with some of the neighbors to make sure they know they're welcome to climb into the shelter. I urged them to just come over, open the door and climb in, even if we aren't at home. I've been in the kitchen baking cookies and muffins so I'll have something to feed hungry firefighters if they go out on search/rescue/recovery missions during this round of storms, in addition to their usual fire and accident calls. Hopefully, we won't need the cookies and muffins and I can just freeze them and save them for another bad day. The earthquakes here surprised me a tiny bit when we moved here, but not a lot. We even have occasional earthquakes in parts of north central Texas, although they are less frequent than the ones in central OK. The large number of quakes the last 18 months or so in central OK does seem a tiny bit excessive. We moved here in mid-April 1999 and didn't have a tornado shelter. Then the May 3, 1999, tornado outbreak occurred and we didn't even know it. Because internet and cell service were almost nonexistent here then (later on, the addition of new cell towers fixed the cell phone issue but internet access was much slower) and local TV reception was very poor (DirectTV saved us), we didn't even know tornadoes were occurring in the OKC area until our phone starting ringing with folks from Texas calling to see if we'd been hit by tornadoes. That year, you couldn't get a tornado shelter here because of the huge demand in the OKC area, but we had a shelter put in early in 2000. Prior to this year, we probably hadn't been in that tornado shelter but maybe once or twice a year and some years not at all. We've already been in it at least 3 times this year because of storms. It does make a great root cellar too. I'm hoping none of us have to flee to the shelters today or tonight, but know it is likely some of us will. I think I am almost more afraid of the hail which they keep describing as potentially larger than baseballs than the possibility of a tornado. Neither one is a pleasant option though. I won't blame you for the earthquakes because you redeemed yourself by creating a whole new method for lasagna vegetable composing/bed building and strawberry gardening. : ) I think the genius of what you did there gives you redemption for causing the earthquakes in Oklahoma. C'mon, on a day like today, we have to find something to laugh about..... Dawn

wbonesteel, I am thrilled y'all have had rain recently. I've just been wishing and hoping we'd get some too. We finally did last night during the tornado warning. I crept outside right before bedtime with the flashlight and checked the rain gauge and it had a half-inch. A little after midnight another thunderstorm hit. It was mostly thunder, lightning and wind for the longest time and then finally more rain fell. This morning there is a total of 0.95" in the rain gauge from yesterday and last night. The skies are darkening up and it is beginning to thunder, so maybe we are about to get a little more rain. So, our month-to-date total at our house for May rainfall jumped from 0.04" to 0.99". That's a nice improvement. I haven't watered any more than the bare minimum to keep everything a little happy. I've been holding out for the rain we should be getting at this time of year. We have completed one new garden area out back (our original garden is in front between the house, which sits 300' back from our rural road, and the road) and another new area is in process. My goal with the two new areas is to be able to grow everything at once, instead of relying on constant succession planting. I get great results from constant succession planting, but the water bills in 2011 and 2012 were off-the-charts and I'd like to grow the same amount, but get it all to finish up by the end of July, more or less, so I don't have to water heavily all summer during drought. This year most of the big garden out front is cool-season crops, and all those are clustered together. When they come out, if I think it is too dry to succession crop without extensive irrigation, I'll sow their areas with a cover crop and let it be. The portion of the big garden in warm-season crops is only about 30% of the total area, so at least I'll only have to irrigate that portion of the garden if the rainfall remains below the needed levels. The entire back garden is warm-season plants, so the majority of the irrigation needed will be done back there. I'm planning to lay out the drip irrigation lines this weekend, as soon as I get the last little bit of that area planted, which likely will occur today....or tomorrow if it rains all day today. I have a corner of that garden with Johnson grass regrowth and I need to hand-dig all those clumps out before I plant southern peas and sunflowers there. The third garden area that still is under construction could have been completed this week, but we got sidetracked (willingly) by other tasks, mostly shopping for butterfly plants and putting them in. I had half-way made up my mind that I wouldn't even finish that 3rd area and plant anything there this spring if rain didn't start falling. Now that rain is falling, maybe we'll work on it next week. There's lots of storms in the weekend forecast, so maybe I should say we'll work on it if the weather allows. This 3rd area is mostly for several varieties of C. moschata winter squash and summer squash that need room to roam. I am trying two varieties of C. moschata avocado summer squash that are new to us this year, and then I have about a dozen rozelle plants to put in that area too, but they are still small and in the greenhouse. Since the new garden area out back is new and I don't have any sort of image in my head of how it has to be or should be planted, I have been having fun with it. I don't have to stop and think, "okay, tomatoes were here last year....so this year they need to be moved over there...." That has left me free to just put stuff wherever I want, which is sort of liberating. With the rain that fell in the last 24 hours, we are up to about 9.7" for this year at our house. That still is way below average, but it is better than the 8.7" we were stuck at for the last few weeks. I can remember good years here (2002, 2004, 2007 and a major portion of 2010) when I hardly had to water at all. The drought years have been tough ones. Our spring-fed pond no longer is spring fed and stays empty most of the year. Our overflow pond that catches the runoff from the big spring-fed pond, hasn't has any overflow water in it since 2009. Our spring-fed swamp in a different area no longer is swampy. Our big creek is empty most of the time, and our smaller creeks are empty all the time except during a rainstorm with heavy runoff. We used to have tons of little ponds, spring, pools of water, creeks, etc. all over our acreage, and now we don't. We're lucky though, because we aren't ranchers. Many ranchers around us have reduced their herds to almost nothing the last few years, and others have spent a lot of time and money putting in new stock tanks, hoping to be able to catch and hold enough water to get the cattle through the summer. When I look at all the challenges our ranching friends face in these recurring dry years, I stop whining about how dry my garden is. Early in the year we had decent rainfall and I thought it might last, and I was so excited. Then it pretty much stopped. We had made it out of severe drought and back to moderate drought, but only stayed there about 2 or 3 weeks and then slipped back into severe drought. When you are in severe drought before summer even arrives, you know it will be a tough summer. I have been wishing for a nice wet year like 2007, minus the flooding, but I guess this isn't going to be that year. I'm going to go find a year-to-date rainfall map and post it, and we can look at it and see how the state of Oklahoma is doing overall. I know some parts have had great rainfall but many others are still hurting. One problem with early spring rainfall is that it causes a lot of plant growth. Then, when the rain stops, there is more fuel in grasslands and woodlands to feed the wildfires that have become increasingly common here in the summer months. It used to be our big wildfire season was winter when everything was dry and dormant, but in recent years, the summer wildfire season has been almost as bad. It is so dry here in our county that green grass has been burning, which freaks out a lot of people because they think green grass doesn't burn. Here in OK when the grassfires and wildfires start up, everything can burn....and that is what I'd hope we can avoid this summer. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Rainfall Summary Maps