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

If you have not cleaned the inside of your tower in the last year, especially if you have animals and a lot of dust, do yourself and your pc a huge favor and open that thing up and get those dust bunnies out of there, that in itself will save you a LOT, your pc will run better, less heat, last longer and not take as much effort to run. That is one of the top killers of computers. And it is a task anyone can do. If you need tutorials there are tons of them on google and youtube with step by step direction and we are here to help also. Just do it!! Mine have clear panels so everything inside is visible I have to keep a neat pc LOL But I love having the ability to see what is happening inside. Plus I like all the pretty lights too. I also cringe when I hear " I just turn off the power strip " My sincere hope is that each individual pc and monitor were actually properly shut down individually Before the strip was just turned off!! Unfortunately I know in some cases that is not so.

Robert, How can you be dry when you get about 100 inches of rain per year? All kidding aside, your soil drains too fast. My garden wilts daily too, so you know, in an odd way (since misery loves company), I'm glad I'm not the only one with that issue so early in the summer. We only went up to 96 (at our mesonet station) and 97 (at our house) but our heat index was 110. That's ridiculous, and it is at least the second time this year we've had a heat index that high. I feel a miserable summer coming on. The bigger problem is that it isn't cooling of much at night. When it is something like 85 when you go to sleep and 77 when you wake up, then you know the plants and animals outdoors didn't get much of a break. Hi Jack, I didn't do any food preservation today. Yay! I do have a big pile of tomatos, peppers and squash staring at me as I type this, so tomorrow is going to be all about food preservation. Probably Saturday too. It will be too hot to be outdoors, so I might as well be in the kitchen. I'm glad you got rain. Things are getting pretty bad here. Last week some vehicle on I-35 either was dragging a chain or had a tire shedding pieces that started several fires alongside the road from mile marker 27 to mile marker 16. Even the green grass was burning (and making tons of smoke) and it was windy, so the firefighters were working hard to try to stop those fires. To have that happen this time of the year, when we usually are enjoying our two rainiest months of May and June is just bizarre. I noticed all the firefighters are wound up and quickly doing vehicle maintenance, buying supplies, etc. to gear up for a very early start to the summer fire season. It seems like there wasn't much of a break this year between the winter fire season and the summer fire season. It is almost like we skipped Spring. I have to hurry and finish all my canning as soon as possible because it is impossible for me to leave when the pagers go off if I am in the middle of a canning batch. I weeded a little today but then gave it up. We have too many venomous snakes and the plantings in the garden are so thick now that I cannot see where I am putting my hand when I weed, so it officially now is too dangerous to weed, which makes me crazy. Every time I put my hand down to pull a weed today, I worried a snake was going to strike it from the shadows or from beneath the plants. I just cannot function that way, so the weeds will be trying to take over now. Hazel, The guys who track the moisture levels are monitoring broad trends (and we in our gardens are monitoring the more narrow trend of moisture on our own places) and have certain parameters they follow. If you read the OK Mesonet's Daily Ticker, Gary McManus often drops hints about what is coming. If I picked up on his hints correctly, y'all are going to move into drought pretty quickly if you don't get some good rainfall very soon, and he didn't seem to indicate that he thought that sort of rainfall is in the works for central OK. Right now he is using the term Flash Drought because we have progressed into it fairly quickly. I believe the kind we have in our county would be the Flash Drought caused by a lack of precipitation. Some years we get the other kind of Flash Drought---the one where rainfall (on paper, anyway) has been adequate but the onset of persistent, extreme heat is causing so much moisture evaporation from the ground (and, I guess, the accompanying excessive transpiration by the plants) that an area progresses quickly into drought caused more by the heat than a lack of moisture. Often I feel like we are progressing to the next drought level well ahead of it showing up on the Drought Monitor map, but I do think we gardeners (and farmers and ranchers) are more sensitive to perceived dryness than the average person. I've always said that by the time the Drought Monitor finally puts us in the Abnormally Dry category, it already is so dry that I can keep the garden plants alive with irrigation but that I cannot keep them producing. So, it hurts my gardener's heart to see we have moved into Moderate Drought. It was bad enough being Abnormally Dry. It is early in the summer for this, and the plants still are producing pretty well from the Spring rainfall, though we're extremely short. I think we're about 8" below normal and that's a horrible way to go into the summer. If this heat and dryness continue, I don't know how long the garden will continue to produce well. Once the canning is done, tomato plants are expendable except for a couple for fresh eating. The onions are beyond needing water, so I don't have to water them. Even the asparagus probably can get by without irrigation. Everything else, though, will need water and I cannot abandon the perennial bed along the driveway because it has several new perennials growing in it this year. I tried to group all the heat lovers together in the back garden so that, if I have to, I can stop watering the front garden (except for the perennials) and only water the back garden. It just kills me to do that, but continuing drought and 2 large garden spots force hard decisions to be made. I am having to make water puddles daily for the visiting ducks, Augustus the turkey, the wild birds, the frogs and turtles and the bunnies, deer and wildlife. Tomorrow I'll drag out the old green Mr. Turtle sandbox that we use as a wildlife waterer in drought and fill it with water for the wild things. As the water in the ponds and creeks get low and the water is sort of stagnant and gross, the wild things flock to the Mr. Turtle. It is sort of comical to watch. Animals that normally sort of avoid one another will stand side by side in the evening and drink as soon as all our animals and people are indoors. I can watch them from inside the house if I put Mr. Turtle close enough or at least at the right angle. I am not ready for drought. Really not ready. Only 1.26% of the state is in drought and I live within that 1.26%. That irritates me, but I guess the garden and I will just keep on going for as long as we can and we'll keep hoping for (but not expecting) rain. Dawn

Assuming California ballpark utility rates of $1.25 per therm and 15.34 cents per kwh, a 3.7 UEF Heat Pump Water Heater is cheaper to operate, than any available gas model. I agree there are many situations that call for tankless gas but for most new construction, HPWH is now best choice. New designs can account for space requirements. Cold climates are the toughest fit, but think a good case can be made for them when incorporated into design. For existing replacements in temperate garages, large utility rooms and basements, HPWH should be the first choice. Just make sure the space matches the headroom and volume requirements. Some don't seem to make a distinction between high efficiency gas models that have fairly safe combustion venting and cheap gas models that are atmospherically or naturally vented. The only safe place for atmospherically vented models is strictly outside of the building envelope. Backdrafting so regularly, they should be illegal inside a home and someday will be. We do combustion appliances for clients that want them but will not do natural vented gas models inside the building envelope. They are a serious liability whether the home is tight or leaky. 30 years NG transition seems about right but that's for utility scale generation. Burning it inside residential homes adds too much unnecessary risk. The backdrafting issues are not compatible with efficient construction. Especially now that heat pumps are cheaper to heat with than NG in most utility markets. ETA: I appear to be way off with current ballpark CA utility pricing. At 19 cents per kwh and $1 per therm, NG is cheaper to operate assuming high efficiency units. Sorry CA! That's ignoring monthly utility fees and reduced cooling loads which if included, could make HPWH the better investment. Agree with David that NG is artificially low there compared to electric and is likely to change soon. ETA 2: Digging deeper into average CA prices, 1.25 per therm may not be too far off. Lots of regional and yearly variances in that state. In San Fran's current market, the Prestige beats NG but in San Diego it does not. Let's just say it's competitive there, for now.. :)