I hear ya, It's hard to get motivated around here. I think we got right around 6" of rain. I need to do a couple of projects but this cold wet weather sure makes it hard to get out and do it. It takes all my get up and go just to feed the critters here. Mushy, mushy , mushy

We ended up with 7.18" and that was far too much.

I hear you on the "mushy, mushy, mushy". We were so mushy before it rained that fire trucks were getting stuck in the fields fighting grass fires (horrible combination of dry vegetation and exceptionally wet ground). Now that it has rained another 7+", our only hope is that the vegetation doesn't catch fire. All that tall dry grass may look wet now, but it likely still would burn if a fire started.

Our driveway is a creek, and water just keeps seeping out of our neighbor's woodland to the south and uphill from the driveway and flowing like a slow spring down into the driveway. Maybe we should take up kayaking. We could park the truck at the foot of the driveway near the road, and kayak downhill to it. Walking uphill in the mud is a bad memory from December 2010 when the driveway became such a soggy, soppy, mushy mess that we had to park at the road and walk for about 3 weeks before it was dry enough for our backhoe guy to bring a new load of gravel and fix our washed out drive. That may have happened again in 2012 or 2013. December in a wet year tends to be a disaster around here in terms of mud and flowing water in the driveway.

The sun has tried valiantly two or three times to peek out from behind the clouds so far today, but each time just as we were about to have sunlight, another cloud blew over the sun and thwarted its efforts. I doubt we'll see the sun today.

I'm not complaining, I'm just missing the brightness of the sun. I feel incredibly fortunate, Robert, that we aren't flooded, iced over or shaking from an earthquake. In the overall scheme of things, clouds instead of sunshine.....well, that's not the worst winter weather hazard we have, is it? Life has been kinder to southern and southeastern OK this weekend than it has been to northern, western and central OK.

We did pretty good in Cushing. Temps refused to stay at freezing for very long. I feel for all others, tho.

I'm remembering the blizzard that one Christmas. This is what it was like that year.

But, hey, I believe it will be a bodacious spring with all this moisture in ground!
bon

The only thing about going into spring with wet soil is that if it is too wet, seeds don't sprout well, or they sprout and damp off, or they sprout, grow and then get a root rot or fungal disease. I am a Gardening Goldilocks. I don't want for the soil to be too wet or too dry.....it must be just right (and it seldom is).

I loved the Christmas blizzard because it was my first white Christmas ever. Well, it snowed on Christmas Eve (and presumably we had some snow left on Christmas Day) when I was 5 years old, but I barely remember it at all....and what I do remember is going to the park to play in the snow with my dad. I have no memory of it being snowy and being Christmas, so I guess it was more important to me at the time that we had snow than that we had snow for Christmas. Then, it probably was another 7 or 8 years before we had snow again, as far as I can remember. Growing up in Ft. Worth, we didn't get snow very often at all, and usually what we actually got was sleet but we called it snow.

The sun is over here. I roped it and brought it here after I heard the power was out on and off all weekend. I was in Denton but people here really got cold with Temps in the 20's and no heat for over 15 hours at one stretch. I will send it back when they turn the power back on.

The sunshine was out for about two hours today but then the clouds came back. I hope we see more tomorrow I am sooooooo ready for sunshine. Not even December yet and I am ready for summer, as Dawn said compared to what most of the state is dealing with I will not complain to loud.

i hope you guys that are covered in ice or flood waters can get back to normal very soon, I've been there (as we all have) and it's no fun.

Everything melted and dried up here today. It is supposed to warm up every day here.

Dawn, I'm curious.....how do you record and keep track of the rain (and everything else) that happens in your garden? I'm finally retired and a full-time gardener now, so I'd like to start my own history. I've heard you talk about the Mesonet station near you, but the one nearest me is 13 miles away. My neighbor, a 1/2 mile away, and I can get different rainfall amounts, so I don't take much stock in our Mesonet.

Have you built your own weather station?

You always seem to know when and how much it rained, how hot it was and how hard the wind blew - ten years ago! How do you do that? It just blows me away!!

How do you record such copious notes about your garden? What all do you record? What you plant, when you plant, where you plant, your harvest? Please share your system.

My grandparents moved from Love County to Crescent back in the '20's. I've been looking on Google Earth to find your garden. I'd love to see all your garden beds - how big they are and where they are in your yard. But, there is no way I am going to plant the volume you do. My garden is much smaller. When I used Google Earth and looked at our backyard, we could pin point when the picture was taken. I had just dug my 60' creek in the backyard, there where cars parked around the churches, and the wheat had been cut, so we knew it was on the last Sunday in June. Pretty cool.

Our son is the Volunteer Fire Chief here in Crescent (following in his father's footsteps) and has used Google Earth to compile a database of all the farm ponds using Google Earth in Logan County to use when we have grass fires. He's heard me talk of your gardening prowess and suggested we look for your place - but so far, no luck. Would you give me your coordinates?

I've been following this site for several years and now that I have the time, hope to participate more. I've learned so much from everyone. Thanks.

Patti

Glad to see you chiming in, Patti. I stopped by to post this in memory of 2007. We're getting closer .....

Sunshine!

We've had a lot more sunshine the last two days and have been so glad to see it. I've been spending as much time as possible outdoors in the sun, so less time inside cleaning house or on my computer. I'm going to head outdoors in a minute now just as soon as the temperature gets up above freezing. It was 29 degrees the last time I looked at the thermometer, but the sun is up now so I should be able to go out shortly.

Kim, Thanks for not keeping the sunshine too long. We needed it here too. I would have like to have watched you lasso the sun and haul it off to the TX panhandle.

We awakened yesterday morning to a thin sheet of ice coating the trees and fences and other exposed surfaces. Since no rain had fallen, I assume we had freezing fog during the night. There also was very heavy dew on the grass, but I've never seen dew freeze on tree trunks and limbs like what we saw on our front yard trees yesterday. Of course, it melted away as soon as the sun rose.

Bon, We are at a little over 71" of rain so far this year. Our previous record, from 1990, is a little over 59", so our rainfall record wasn't just broken, it was smashed. Everything here is mud, mud, mud. It is crazy....and yet we spent several months in various stages from being Abnormally Dry to Extreme Drought. Our weather here is just so bizarre. I always say I'd like to have a normal weather year for once, but I think for OK, bizarre weather that swings from one extreme to another is our "normal", so maybe I should ask for an abnormal year with no extremes.

Patti, We have multiple rain gauges that I check and empty daily, and several thermometers, all posted at 5' above ground in full shade. I started tracking my own weather when I began to realize that our rainfall/temperatures almost always vary a great deal from our local Mesonet station, which sits NW of us by several miles. The weather data recorded by our local NWS Cooperative Observer is a bit more similar to ours than that from the Mesonet station as his house is about halfway between the Mesonet station and our house, but even so, some days he records a lot more or less rain than we have. For years, I used to record our daily high, low and precipitation total on a regular wall calendar, but found that when I got really busy in gardening and canning season then I would forget to record the totals. Now I mostly keep a running rainfall total in my head.

For me, the big catalyst that pushed me to watch my own weather closely was a day in late April or early May almost a decade ago when our forecast low was around 50 degrees and we dropped to 32 degrees. Almost my entire garden froze to the ground, and I had tomato plants that were 3' tall and had fruit the size of baseballs (prior to that freeze, we had been frost-free and above-freezing for many weeks). I began to see the value of recording our own rainfall in the 2006-2007-2009 time frame on days we were forecast to have 2-3" of rain and got 6.25"-9.25" or 5" of forecast rain actually gave us a total of 12.89". Because rain can vary greatly over a small area (even gauges I have 200-300' from each other often record remarkably different amounts), I knew I needed to record our own actual rainfall instead of relying on the official totals. Most years, by the end of the calendar year, our rainfall total from home, the local CO-OP observer and the Mesonet station end up being fairly similar even if they varied from one another a great deal during a certain part of the year, so I guess it all averages out in the year. Still, I want to know how much rain fell on my yard and garden, not 3 or 6 or 9 miles away.

I don't keep any written records of what, where, how, etc. I plant. I am not a numbers person. I just plant until I have what feels like "enough" of each thing in the ground and then I stop. I've been doing this for decades, and I know how much harvest I generally get from planting a set amount of each item, and I don't really mean that I know 30 broccoli plants give us all we can eat fresh plus fills up the freezer.....I just transplant broccoli plants into the ground until it feels right for that year's timing/weather and then I stop. So, my gardening is not mechanical/planned so much as it is intuitive. When you garden intuitively, your brain is, of course, operating like a little computer and is looking at the current weather conditions/timing (big difference in everything if the last frost is the first week of March as opposed to the first week of May) as you plant and directing you what to do. I jokingly say that I listen to "the voices in my head", but I don't mean that in a schizo way....I mean it in an intutive way. The great thing about gardening here is that we can sow succession crops from January or February through October or November, so there's always a chance to plant another round of something if you don't get enough of it planted the first time.

I try to keep every square inch of my garden planted at all times, partly because I hate wasted space and partly because Mother Nature will plant weeds in any spot I leave vacant for a week. Since I'd rather harvest veggies, fruits, flowers or herbs as opposed to pulling weeds, I immediately replant any harvested area. So, for example, if I harvest the last of the broccoli or cabbage on a late Spring morning, then in the afternoon I am putting pepper plants, bush beans or southern pea seeds or whatever in the newly empty space. Just from being in my garden daily, I knew how much of everything is thriving, what is or isn't planted yet, and what I need to use to fill any newly open space that resulted from the harvesting of an early crop. I also often intercrop, growing 2 or 3 types of edible plants in the space most people use only for one. For example, I often grow lettuce and carrots as living ground covers beneath tomato or pepper plants. I grow sugar snap peas on a trellis, and grow cabbage or lettuce in a row along the south side of the trellis so that peas grow above and cabbage or lettuce (or kale or Swiss chard or whatever) below.

For privacy and security reasons, I decline to give you or anyone else my coordinates and I don't post photos that show what our garden looks like since it is very visible from the road. My husband is in law enforcement and prefers we guard our privacy on the internet. Because of his decades in law enforcement, we know that criminal types often prowl social media and internet forums looking for folks to burglarize, etc., and we decline to make it easy for any of them to find us. I realize this not a popular stance nowadays when people post photos of their entire lives in ways easily accessible to public view but we are old dinosaurs and we aren't going to change. It isn't members of this forum we worry about, it is the fact that such things, once posted, can be seen by anyone who bothers to look for them. There was, in fact, a member of this forum (now deceased) who lived on the same road as us and not too far from our house. It didn't bother me that he knew where we lived until another neighbor (highly reliable) told me some troubling things about that person. After that, I wasn't entirely comfortable knowing that he knew where our house was but, in fairness to him, nothing creepy ever happened here, as far as I know. He figured out where our house was just because I once mentioned a next-door neighbor by name and he knew where that person lived, so I've learned to keep my mouth shut about stuff like that.

I did look at satellite photos of our place from the air once or twice and it was disappointing. Because our garden is, in essence, in a clearing in a woodland, all you see are trees, which hide the house and the garden. In the winter, everything is the same color since all the mulched beds and paths are mulched with hay and leaves and blend in with everything around them. The only satellite photo I ever found of our place showing how it looked in winter was well over a decade old and looked nothing like our place looks now. All my raised beds are 4' wide and run east-west and all the pathways are 2' wide. It really isn't anything special to look at. There's no amazing layout or anything. It is just an old dirt garden and I am an old dirt gardener.

This spring will be our 18th spring garden here and trees on the west and north that weren't too very tall when we broke ground for the garden are incredibly tall and wide now and looming high above it. (I knew this day would come eventually, but the garden spot is in just about the only really sunny place we have that doesn't flood heavily, so putting it someplace else was not an option.) In fact, the trees on the north lean over towards the garden at an increasingly awkward angle, stealing its sunlight more and more each year. I have been shrinking down the front garden for about a decade now, making it smaller every year by surrending space back to the woods on the north and west sides, but am tired of giving back space to Mother Nature. We are contemplating spending the month of January either cutting down about a dozen huge trees that sit north and west of the garden (this will involve removing the fence lest it be crushed and then putting it back up again), or moving the fence and taking in more space to the east to make up for what the trees are shading out on the north and west. We wanted to do it last winter, but it rained nonstop so we couldn't work outdoors enough to do much of anything. I worry this winter will be the same. I once had a garden that was almost square, considering we had to work around existing trees, a pond, the driveway, etc. Now it is increasingly become a longer, narrower rectangle year after year. Who knows what we'll end up with this spring after we cut trees and/or move the fence, etc. I built a lot of my early raised beds using the lasagna gardening method of layering materials atop one another. Now, as the garden stretches out in length and narrows in width, my lasagna garden is turning into a linguine or spaghetti garden.

Now, I'm headed outdoors for most of the rest of the day.

Dawn

It was a beautiful day. Sunny and no wind to speak of. My grandson and I spent the whole day out side. It was like early May. I have so much cleanup to do in the garden. I am in no hurry to do it, let the birds and critters enjoy it for a while. Next week is looking good also, we need to dry out. The rain can hold off for a while.

our crazy barn cat was doing a little solar sunning all afternoon. Dogs played and played. I got the frisbee out and they wore me out!!!

last couple of weeks we have had an owl close to the house at night, so every night I go to sleep listening to him hoot. Love it'!!! During the days we have had two very large Hawks working the pastures and creeks. Everything here is quite at the moment, show about you guys.

It was a gorgeous day here too once it warmed up a bit. I started out outdoors when it was chilly, but dressed in layers so I could shed the excess clothing as the temperatures warmed up. By afternoon the weather was perfect, though it still is too wet to do a lot of the chores that need to be done. We have had so much rain that I don't know when or if (in terms of this winter) the soil will be dry enough to work.

I haven't done much garden clean-up yet either. The garden is full of birds and I try to leave plants standing as long as possible for them. While in the garden yesterday I noticed quite a few green plants still, including hollyhocks, French hollyhocks, autumn sage (one plant is still blooming despite several frosts and freezes), Laura Bush petunias, verbena bonariensis, fennel, four o'clocks, parsley and comfrey, but I could (and probably will) go ahead and take out tomato cages and their stakes today. I have about 100 of them to do so it will take me a while. I have a gazillion tiny zinnia seedlings in pathways that somehow have avoided freezing to death so far, but I don't think they'll last much longer. It is crazy how long some of the annual flowering plants have held on this year, but in a good way.

The acorns and pecans are driving me crazy. You can hardly walk for all the nuts lying on the ground and raking them up is a PITA. Not cleaning them up is worse though as trying to walk on ground covered in acorns is like trying to walk on marbles, or golf balls, depending on the acorn variety. We have a yard filled with oak trees and a few native pecan trees and every one of them has produced huge amounts of nuts. The deer in this part of the state will have lots of food this winter thanks to the bountiful mast crop but I'm not happy about having all those acorns lying on the ground.

The next few days look like they will be beautiful and sunny (hooray!) so I hope to get a lot done outdoors. The coyotes sure are plentiful this year and are very loud at night, and their howling drives our dogs up the wall. I know El Nino usually brings a lot of winter rain, so I just hope to get as much done outdoors as possible before the winter rain really gets going. Honestly, we had so much rain last week that even if we don't get another drop for the rest of the year, we'll be in good shape. Ponds and creeks are overflowing here and the Red River is as high as you'll ever see it at this time of the year, though it has stayed just below flood stage (yay!).

Another garden seed catalog arrived yesterday and, of course, I saw some things in it that I'd like to have, though I probably don't need any more seeds.

Ok, I googled Autumn Sage (I'm kind of on a sage kick) but didn't come up with sources. Suggestions?