Rapidly Changing Forecast---Could Mean Lots More Rain This Week
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
8 years ago
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slowpoke_gardener
8 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
8 years agoRelated Discussions
Rain, rain, and more rain..................
Comments (18)Carol, During the Red River flooding of 2007, parts of our Mesonet station were disabled for days and days. I think the issue lasted until the worst of the flooding subsided. At some point they went back and manually corrected what records they could, but much data for the Burneyville station for that month is incomplete and considered somewhat unreliable. It drove me nuts. I had to rely only on my own observations! LOL I need a rain gauge that measures 10 or 12" of rain. I don't need it often (hee hee) but once every 2 or 3 years we get 25-35% of our annual rainfall in one day. When that happens, depending on how fast the rain is falling, I have to put on my muck boots, grab an umbrella and run outside and empty the rain gauge when it gets close to the 6" mark so it won't overflow and give an incorrect measurement. In April 2006, we had 9.25" in one day and most of that fell in about 4 hours. I went out and emptied out the gauge when it hit 5", and then I went out and emptied it out again when it hit 4". Shortly after that, the rain pretty much stopped. This year, the 12.4" fell over a longer period of time--maybe 8 hours or so--and I dumped the rain gauge 2 or 3 times so it wouldn't overflow. Based on statistics, we shouldn't have a massive rainfall for another 2 or 3 years, but sometimes statistics lie. "Christmas Day maybe?" LOL LOL LOL Here is what I am thinking. I am about to catch up and I will have one of those days really, really soon. I have two large bowls of tomatoes on my counter to process, so I think I'll roast them and a few other veggies at the same time and maybe make roasted tomato-garlic soup. That takes care of them. Then, I'll pick tiny tomatoes this evening (too hot already this a.m.) and dehydrate them. Then, I shouldn't have to process tomatoes again for 2 to 4 days, although I pick daily. I'll pick okra at the same time I pick little tomatoes, add it to what I picked yesterday, and blanch and freeze that. That's another veggie I shouldn't have to harvest again until tomorrow evening then, and I usually wait until I have two days' worth before I blanch/freeze. I also should have enough purple hull pinkeyes tonight to either cook a batch or freeze one, and then I should be able to skip picking for a day or two because they are slowing down. So, if I can get black-eyed pes, okra and tomatoes all done today/this evening, I shouldn't have to process them again for about three days. LOL It isn't much, but it is the best I can do. That only leaves hot peppers and sweet peppers. OK, so I have a lot of sweet peppers coloring up and I can pick them and freeze them for future use any time. I might do that tomorrow. If I do, it will take me just a couple of hours to pick 'em, wash 'em, slice 'em or chop 'em and get them into the freezer. That, then would leave only hot peppers. I've done a very heavy picking of hot peppers at least every other week since mid-July. At the present time, it has been about 10 days since I did a heavy picking, although I run out to the garden and pick as needed for cooking or canning recipes. So, I might be able to go 5-7 days before I pick hots again since rainfall is low and growth is relatively slow. So, where this is leading to is here: if I pick and process okra, peas and tomatoes tonight (Thurs.) and sweet peppers on Friday, and postpone hots until Mon. or Tues., then I should have Saturday off! Well, I'll have to pick okra, but I can stick it in the fridge and blanch/freeze it on Sunday. So, you see, I might get a day off. Unfortunately, Saturday is our best chance of rain here (about a 70% chance of rain and they are saying it may be heavy) so it probably would be a good day to be inside canning. It is hard to make the 'day off' fall where you want it to fall. I might do all I can on Saturday if it is raining, and try to make Sunday the day off because I love to cook a big family lunch and spend the afternoon watching NFL football. We still need and want rain here, and I think that by the end of the weekend, maybe I'll be able to say we finally got some. And, all my food processing predictions assume the plants will ripen produce as I expect it to. Every now and then, you walk out in to the garden and discover that blackeyed peas are suddenly purple earlier than expected, or the okra grew especially fast overnight or whatever. At this point, I'm just grateful the fall beans, corn, cukes and peas aren't producing finished products yet. As long as I keep up with the still-producing summer plants, I will be putting up a little food regularly, but not huge amounts on any given day. I will have a big green bean and big corn day or two in October if all goes well. I really think the heavy food processing load is lessening though. I'm still doing frequent batches, but smaller ones. When the fall broccoli is ready, that will be a big day or two, but that's some time off. Dawn...See MoreOctober 2017 Week 5: Boo, Halloween Rain, Time To Turn Back the Clocks
Comments (63)Nancy, Gold is better than plain brown. Honestly, anything is better than plain brown. Around Thursday or so I noticed green leaves falling from some trees---they didn't even turn brown first. I think our trees are confused. Why wouldn't they be? Every week they are exposed to lows in the 30s and highs in the 90s. How they even know what season we are in at this point is beyond me. Currently it is 90 degrees at our Mesonet station and 89 at our house. There's reports of haziness and smoke in the air, but none of us are spotting any plumes of smoke, so I think that, as the rumored cold front moves across the state, it may be pushing smoke, fog, haze, smog, dust or whatever ahead of it. There was a 1,700 acre wildfire in the county west of us yesterday and it looked like smoke was hanging over the river this morning, so maybe it is that. Our gold foliage peaked around Thursday or Friday and is going to a dull golden brown today. I believe the hard freeze we had a few days ago has really impacted the tree foliage. Further south in Texas where the freeze didn't happen or at least was not as prolonged as it was here, they have better foliage color than we do right now. At least 3 or 4 of the red oaks in the yeard near our house have some red, and our big red oak near the road, which is my favorite tree, is beginning to show some red. It probably will peak next week though it is hard to tell in this weather. We turned back the clocks at bedtime last night so at least we'd be in sync with the rest of the area when we woke up today. It didn't matter what time the clock was showing---I woke up at the same time I do every single day, even if the clock showed it was an hour earlier. My body clock gets pretty firmly set on a time and doesn't really care what the clock says. It takes me at least a month to adjust to a time change and then before you know it, we're springing forward or falling back all over again. Jennifer, I'm glad you feel a little better today and hope you didn't cough your way through making the announcement at church. Hot and windy, hot and windy, hot and windy. It feels more like earliest September than early November. Chris sent me a text about a half-hour ago---a shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, near San Antonio, TX. Word is several people were shot, including children, before police arrived and took out the shooter. He said he had heard 15 people were down, but I haven't seen any firm number on any media yet, and often early report are erroneous. It just seems to me like the world has gone mad---it is sad when people are not safe in church. And, in a state like Texas with open carry, it is unfortunate someone in that church wasn't armed because perhaps they could have stopped the shooter. It seems wrong to carry a gun to church, but we cannot kid ourselves---these shootings can happen anywhere any more. I'd like to be working in the garden, but all the swarms are still out there---Asian lady bugs, wasps, bees, yellow jackets....so I'm indoors. Oh, and the fire ants and harvester ants all are out and scurrying around. I guess maybe they are busy storing up provisions for winter. Dawn...See MoreFebruary 2018, Week 3, Planting and....Rain, Sleet, Snow
Comments (135)Kim, Sophie has my sympathy. Our dogs hate it too when the neighbors are shooting. I usually let them stay in, but sometimes they just have to go out at least for a couple of minutes, and then they are at the back door barking and carrying on and wanting back in within 60 seconds. I'm glad Sophie did so well getting her pins out. Nice score on all the seeds! You CAN teach a class. Just pretend you are talking to Ryder or to any of us instead of a larger crowd. You can do this! Sorry about the wind. I wish it would blow hard here---it would help dry up some of this excess moisture, but I know you don't need it there. March is coming and you live in a very windy part of Texas, so I'm guessing the wind is going to be an issue for quite a while yet. Is there any sort of windbreak anywhere near your new garden plot? Nancy, That sounds like a wedding miracle to me! Of course you cried---seeing one of your kids so happy on their special day is going to lead to tears, and rightfully so. Kim, Most of the seeds you got should do just fine with direct sowing. I am a little worried about the wind, but we have wind here too (usually not quite on the scale you have it there) and it doesn't seem to blow away my seeds. Everything you listed except ice plant and delphinium should be fine from seed sown directly in the ground. Ice plant---it might do okay. Do you have clay there? It needs well-drained sand or sandy loam and it does not tolerate staying overly wet for long periods of time. Delphinium is very iffy. They are beautiful flowers but they like prolonged, cool weather so your luck with them in any given year will depend more on the weather than anything else. Think of them as something that would like the weather in the cool, wet parts of the Pacific Northwest more than the west Texas plains, and don't get your hopes up too high. I simply grow the closely-related larkspur instead, and even the larkspur sometimes rots off at the ground when we are too wet for too long, but it tolerates the heat a lot better than delphiniums do. I have had the best luck with delphiniums when sowing them in the fall. They will germinate and remain as small plants down close to the ground all winter, but then when it warms up they'll grow pretty quickly. Sometimes I have managed to get blooms before the heat kills them, and sometimes not. Our Spring weather is so variable that the results were all over the place when I tried to grow them here. Whenever I see them in bloom in gallon pots in the stores in the Spring, I want to buy them and bring them home and plant them....but I don't.....because they'd basically be expensive annuals here in our hot climate. Jennifer, Three sounds like a nice number. Another 100 might be a bit much, you know, and that's doubly true of the straight runs, which tend to lean very heavily towards being roosters and not pullets. It sounds like yesterday was fun, and I hope you're outdoors enjoying your free afternoon now. Nancy, Well, 10 minutes of plant shopping squeezed in at the end of a day with the girls was enough to hold me another week. We saw ladybugs all over the garden center flying around, and then saw some outside Wal-mart so they certainly are swarming and enjoying this lovely day too. Rudbeckia is a large family with many members and some do great here for me, and others do not. I think some are more finicky about drainage (and powdery mildew) than others, but they're not the hardest things to grow if you choose the right ones. In my garden, most rudbeckias are happier with morning sun/afternoon shade than with full sun all day long. Kim, That's crazy about your friend's Dodge pickup. Try explaining that one to your insurance agent! We do try to be careful which way we park on really windy days, but it is more to keep the wind from slamming the car or truck door shut on someone who's attempting to get in or out in strong wind. I never once thought about the wind being able to break a door off a vehicle. It still is sunny and warm outside, so Tim's got ribeye steaks (our standard Sunday dinner) cooking on the grill and I have everything else cooking indoors. I suspect he'd have been out there grilling even if rain was pouring down, but I'm grateful he didn't have to do that. It only took one week of nonstop rain and cloudy skies to make us tired of the rain. I'm not wishing for another month or two with no rain, but I'm hoping whatever rain we get over the next couple of weeks at least will come in smaller, more manageable amounts. Dawn...See MoreAugust 2018, Week 1, Fire and Rain
Comments (68)Larry, Someone else got 5-lobed bells this year too, maybe it was someone on one of our OK gardening Facebook pages. I'll get an occasional five-lobed bell but not often. It sounds like you were very busy, even as a child. I think you would have made a great doctor because you would have been trying to save your patients, not trying to kill them by supper time (I hope). My best friend contracted polio from the vaccine when we were young children. He survived it and appeared to have mostly recovered, but had a limp forever after. The polio came back when he was in his 40s or early 50s and it killed him. I never knew that could happen---like he wasn't really cured. It stayed hidden in his body for decades and then came back strong. Nancy, I'm already exhausted and we have almost 24 hours more to go. She is more exhausted though. We were running around all day and when we got home about 2 pm, she grabbed her pajamas and told me she was going to go take her bath and get ready for bed---and she was serious. I told her it was not bed time, but swimming pool time, and she woke right up. Now she's fighting to stay awake until after dinner time. Unless she gets a second wind, I think it will be a really early night for her tonight. This week the kids are fascinated with icebox melons. I harvested 13 of them yesterday, ranging in size from about the size of an orange to the size of a cantaloupe and they are in love with the little ones, which I think are the variety Mini Love, and also in love with the fact that there are three colors of flesh---red, yellow and orange. We have tons of icebox melons to eat, and even are sharing them with the fawns and the mothers every evening. We slice and eat melons daily. The nice thing about the icebox sized ones is that they have a pretty long shelf life, so you can cut one or two every day and there's less (if any) left over to put away in the fridge. I don't even put all the melons in the icebox----I just leave them sitting on a counter until we use them. Usually if we cut one or two, we eat all of them that day, or throw out the leftover pieces for the deer. It is so much more convenient than having to cut up a huge one and deal with pieces of it in the fridge for days and days. I didn't do anything in the garden today. I'm just hoping and praying the heavy rain they're saying we will get on Sunday and Monday actually happens. There's been a ton of rain to our south in Texas, particularly in the areas that are in Extreme Drought, so I know that those folks are relieved. The amount of rain they got won't remove the drought, but might knock it back a good deal. The cooler temperatures are very, very nice, so at least we have that, whether the rain comes or not. The garden still looks pretty bad, but when I consider that we're in Severe Drought, I realize it looks about as good as it possibly can considering the weather we are having. Dawn...See Moremksmth zone 7a Tulsa Oklahoma
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