Dorothy, From watching how the jetstream, I think it has persistently come close enough to your end of Oklahoma that you get the gray, gloomy clouds on the edge of the cold fronts that are dropping snow and ice north of you. Way down here in southern OK we've had more sun than last year, but in the last week or so, the sun has become increasingly rare. Keith, You're welcome. I'm getting pretty concerned about y'all up there in central OK. This is the driest I remember seeing your part of the state in winter in several years. I understand exactly what you did and why. I'd probably do exactly the same thing if I was a dry as you are. When my soil gets so dry in drought periods that rainfall or sprinkler irrigation rolls downhill on the surface of the ground and isn't even absorbed, I know I've waited too late to start watering. I think it is always better, even (maybe especially) in winter to water the dry ground. If it gets too, too dry and planting time is approaching, it can be hard to keep the soil moist enough for seeds to sprout. The big mistake I made in one dry spring (may have been 2003 or 2005) is that I planted and watered sparingly waiting for rain to fall to give the seeds and plants more water. Well, rain never fell and by the time I realized that I should have been watering more heavily to get them off to a good start, the were pretty stunted and pathetic. It was a hard lesson to learn, but it made me a better gardener in succeeding dry years. Don't even mention those photos of those big old black clouds. They are fascinating but in a horrifying and very scarey type of way. I hope and pray we've learned enough about conservation and no-till commercial farming that we never put ourselves in that predicament again. Can you imagine the mass hysteria, especially on the part of the media with its 24-hour-news-cycle nowadays if we had something like that occurring? If you haven't read the book about the Dust Bowl days that I've linked below, I highly recommend it. I reread it once every 2 or 3 years to remind myself of how bad it was and what all those folks went through. We throw the word "diaster" and "catastophe" around pretty loosely nowadays, but those people who endured the Dust Bowl years really lived through a catastrophe and it lasted for years. Some of the old-timers here have told me stories about what it was like here in our county, and it wasn't pretty. One of them lived on land adjacent to ours and she tried to explain what it was like to have the big clouds of dust ruin the laundry you'd just washed, or blow through the cracks in walls, etc. into the house and cover everything with a fine layer of dust. She was a very small child then so I'm not sure how much she remembers directly and how much she remembers from hearing her folks talk about it later on their lives. I just can't imagine what it was like to endure 8 long years of catastrophe. My dad did tell me about the pure agony of watching crops fail over and over, which was a disaster for folks who essentially raised all their own food. So, if couldn't grow a crop, you couldn't eat. One thing that sticks in my memory from photos of those days is just how painfully thin everybody was. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: The Worst Hard Time

Bon, They are defoliating in order to survive. If you are able, try to water them deeply at least once a week. That amount of watering will not bring them out of dormancy from a once-a-week deep watering, and you don't want them to because coming back out of dormancy too soon would just be stressful. However, watering is essential for them now. They are saying to you "I am too dry, so I am going dormant to save myself, but I need help or I'll die, so please water me." At least they are putting up a good fight to survive.If you cannot water them, they may progress to death. Moisten the leaf pile bit, but not too much. The last thing you want is a really wet leaf pile that could start cooking inside and combust the way that hay bales do if they are baled and put up in storage while too wet in the middle. What I do is this. I keep them a little moist, but if a fire is on the property next door, I wet down a couple of old blankets and throw them over the compost pile. It is hard to get a wet blanket to burn, so the wet blanket should keep your leaf pile from igniting. In the last couple of years, we've had 3 or 4 fires each summer on property adjacent to ours or across the street from ours, and I'm always worried that if the firefighters don't get those fires extinguished quickly, they'll burn up my compost pile, my remaining bales of hay mulch and my garden, so I usually run out with the hose to try to protect them. My gourds are now sunburning. I left them on the vines hoping enough foliage would hang in there for a while so they could dry down on the vine and cure they way they usually do. I think I will pull them today and try to dry them in the shade. They may still be too green inside. The foliage is toast so there's nothing left to shade them. Next year, plant your gourds in April or May so they have a chance to flower and form gourds in summer and then be dry enough to harvest by fall. Late gourd plantings often have gourds that are still very green by frost and sometimes they cure well (though slowly) but other times they don't. Most years we probably are not hotter than most other places in OK, but last year we hit 115-116 a couple of times at many places in our county, though not at our Mesonet station, and this year we've hit 112-114 at some places in our county, but there again not at our Mesonet station. I think our Mesonet station's highest temperature this summer may be 109, and that was yesterday. It also was 109 here yesterday. Overall, this summer has not felt as hot to me as last year overall, though there have been a few times that it felt so bad out there that I was sure it was the worst day ever, even though it wasn't. Often, when firefighters are fighting those multi-day fires, some of them don't even go home. They'll sleep at the nearest fire station, sleep in their fire trucks, or sleep on the ground. That's why clean socks and undergarments are so helpful to them. Often they fight fire between 12 and 20 hours a day and just catnap. Sometimes they cannot sleep, which I think is part heat stress and partly from the big adrenalin rush that is inherent in firefighting. After having that adrenalin rush through an entire firefighting day, their bodies cannot just "turn off" the adrenalin easily and allow them to sleep. I heard that some departments received so many donations of bottled water and Gatorade that they ran out of room to store it, so that's good, although I don't know if it is true of all the fire departments in the fire-stricken areas. The firefighters always can use bandanas and small towels too. A lot of our guys wear or carry bandanas to use to wipe sweat off their faces, to keep the sun off their neck, or to wet down and wear around their neck or on their heads to help keep them cool. I buy white terry cloth shop towels at Sam's or CostCo in bundles of 60, and you wouldn't believe how many bundles I buy in a year. We started out using old kitchen or bath towels, but I like the shop towels better. Trust me when I tell you that firefighters flinch when you hand them a flowery kitchen towel or a hot pink hand towel from someone's bathroom. White is simple and isn't too feminine for their taste. Socks get wet fairly often and are very uncomfortable inside those fire boots....your feet just steam, so they love having an extra pair or two of dry socks stashed away in the fire truck. I usually have dry tube socks stashed away in one of the cabinets at the fire station so that anyone whose socks are wet can grab a spare pair. My concern level for all parts of Oklahoma remains incredibly high. Between the heat and the drought, I believe many counties have the highest KBDI they've ever had, or are approaching that level, and August is not necessarily known for being a very rainy month. We need rain in a big way before the winds pick up speed in autumn. Even last week and this week the winds are high enough in some places that fires have been and will be hard to control. This year it isn't just plant stress we have to worry about---people and animals are really stressed too. As we go about our daily and routine activities, I think it can be easy to forget that we are now living through what likely will go down in history as the worst drought ever in the USA since they began keeping records. That's monumental. For decades after this, people may look back at this point in history and talk about the drought of 2011 and 2012 they way our parents and grandparents talked about the drought years of the 1930s and 1950s. Dawn

My friend and I rented a space similar to what you're describing. We were fortunate in that they offered 3 mo. contracts. Because our 3 months included Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas... we did well on sales. Having to keep the booth going year 'round would definitely have eaten up the profits. This was our biggest problem. The store owner constantly took pieces from our display and used them to fill in or beautify the less attractive booths. His attitude was that it didn't matter where buyers found the product... just that they bought them. We had very unique items. We'd designed them and created them. They didn't exist anywhere else. But once the guy spread them all over the store it appeared EVERYONE was making them... like a "craft-of-the-month" project. So he not only diminished the artistic value of our pieces by making them appear common place... but he also destroyed the beauty of our booth by taking so many things and then rearranging the leftovers so that it wouldn't be strikingly obvious. After three months of going there several times a week to retrieve our stuff from other booths... we bagged it. Anybody else have that problem?

LOL! In my bird book with the falling-out-pages I have LOTS of post-it notes stuck on the pages with the birds I "for sure" saw, and the date when I saw them--and where, if it was somewhere besides home in Denver! A few post-its with question marks too, when I wasn't positive! Now my "new" Nat. Geo. book is starting to get post-it notes stuck in IT! I could NEVER deal with a book that had the pics in one part and the words somewhere else! Wouldn't possibly have the patience for that! It's hard enough to try to ID a bird when I'm sitting here going, "Don't fly away! Don't fly away!" and trying desperately to manipulate my binoculars and keep my fingers in several different pages of a book--or books! I way agree with the "plain old google search," but ANYTHING can come up in a search, so you need to be really careful that you're looking at the "consensus" and not just picking out a pic that looks like you "want it to look!" Not too long ago I got curious about something and I wound up googling "white people," "black people," "red people," and "yellow people," and several more similar terms, and it was pretty "illuminating" how that all came out! Pretty funny, actually, but pretty sad at the same time! So any internet search definitely needs to be taken With a Grain of Salt! The All About Birds site is REALLY good for identifying them! On the "Identification" tab, on the bottom, there are always several actual photos, plus, just right of that there's "similar species" info--that can be REALLY helpful! And then on the "life history" tab there's info about what they eat, their habitat, and more! Really useful if you see a bird eating seeds and find out what you think it is only eats insects! For anyone who still hasn't gone to that site, here's one page. I saw these last spring at the cabin where I stay on Grand Mesa. Don't have internet there, so ID'd it in a book first, and then looked it up here when I got back home! There are some elms next to the house that were just starting to leaf out--and they were FILLED with these! VERY cool! https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Western_Tanager/id Skybird