Chandra, I am going to link the website of the Texas Forest Service. They have a 'current update' section you can click on that updates once or twice a day and a 'Google Earth' link (both are on right-hand side of their website). Under their Current Update, if you scroll down past the list of new fires, they will have the larger and older uncontained fires listed. Most of them are so large they are in 2 or more counties, and they'll list both the number of acres involved and a list of the counties involved. If you can't find what you need there, let me know and I'll come up with a list of counties where some of the largest wildfires have occurred. In general, the fires over 100,000 acres have been in the western half of Texas, with exceptionally large ones near the McDonald Observatory/Ft. Davis/Davis Mountain area, near San Angelo in SW Texas and about 70 or 80 miles west of Fort Worth in the Possum Kingdom Lake area in Palo Pinto County and Young County. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Texas Forest Service

Dawn, I received a report this evening. I'm puzzled. Not for sure if it was for the first two or all four. She says there is no disease issues and I need to quit spraying copper/daconil. Don't feel she paid attention to the part where I said I had septoria issues and also TSWV but didn't send them in as I can diagnose them. She kept repeating you don't have TSWV. I sent an email stating the plant that has it I didn't send. She says it is stress only and they will recover. I know better than that. When I sent the second plant I debated which one to send. The one I didn't send I pulled last night. It had shriveled up to where it was a foot shorter and the fruit was starting to shrivel. The roots look fine and the soil was very moist. I have left some in the past to try to ripen fruit. If it gets to breaker stage and you pick it and let it ripen inside it will be bitter. I have never seen stress affect plants in this fashion. I also had 3-4 plants that exhibited the same symptoms last fall from mid Sept to frost after the cooldown. So I'm puzzled and not sure what to think. Like I told her in the reply. I will continue to pull them as I've found even if they live 3-4 weeks they never grow again even if it is cool and the fruit from them isn't fit to eat. I yank them and plant squash in their place. At least I get some good from the water I'm using. So basically I don't know anything. I know for sure the last plant had wilt. It was completely wilted at 6 am last Sat morning when it was in the 60's. Again the soil was very moist and it had a great root system. I had the wilt hit two more plants. The one in a container was toast in 3 days. When I pulled it one morning even the stem was limp. Being that I've started I will continue to spray Daconil/copper till at least Sept and maybe for most of the season. I've been trimming leaves. It takes at least 30 minutes a plant. I feel the reason I had septoria was we did have over and inch of rain during that time. Also I had the sweet corn on the south side and our winds quit for several days. And the plants were 6 ft or taller with lots of foliage and canopy. One evening when picking fruit I noticed it was like a sauna in there. I think the combination caused the issue. Being that I've cut the corn down and it hasn't rained and i've been spraying the issue is under control for now. I plan to remove all dead and diseased looking foliage although it is a very slow process. It is just on the caged rows. They were the early plants. I've trimmed up either 4 or 5 plants in 4 evenings. I do everything else first. Will get out early this weekend and try to get several done. Have at least 20 plants to go. This evening I finished up a Prudence Purple from George's seed. It is setting fruit good now. And then moved to the Cowlick''s Brandywine. Knock on wood it has considerable fruit set. One reason I won't quit spraying. I hope I can taste a few this year and save some seeds. I'm guessing maybe 20 or more. From tinies to some around 2-3 ounces. Due to the heat I have some malformed fruits. Mule had some pictures on his site of some he has picked. I have some real oddballs. The one Grandma Suzy's plant that shows heat stress has several with big scars on the bottoms. The other GS's plant so far knock on wood hasn't shown any stress issues. It is at least 2 ft taller and I haven't noticed any problems on the fruit on it. But it is fast proving to be a good setter here. Hopefully both plants will last through the season. Both plants are fairly well loaded. So the fruit set on the Cowlick's was the good news I needed after finding out they didn't find the reason the plants decline and eventaully die. I just never heard of stress causing a change in the color of the top leaves and stems to a light yellow and the blooms all die. Some very small fruit set drops off. The leaves usually never curl till later as the light yellow color works it's way to the bottom of the plant. As it goes down then the stems and leaves curl. She said the one almost looked like herbicide drift. I guess that is possible but why not all the plants in an area and whyt does it continue to happen 1-2 plants a week or so sometimes several feet a part for most of the season? May never know the cause. If it continues I will send plants elsewhere to get a second opinion. Jay

Jay, It is still hot and dry here and my plants are roasting. We have cooled down somewhat. It was only 107 here today, which doesn't sound very cool, but even 107 is better than the 110-112 we've been having, though not all that much better. They keep putting a nice cool 99 or 100 out there 3 or 4 days away, but then as that day approaches, the 99 or 100 goes away.....I guess that's the price we pay here for being so very far south. Like you, I am pleased overall with how well the garden has done despite the heat, but we have been in the 110-112 range for at least a couple of weeks now, and I've stopped watering almost everything. When our temps are that high and our soil is as dry as it is, I cannot water enough to keep the plants producing so I stopped trying. The cool-season crops were a mixed bag, with lettuce, onions and potatoes doing well, and everything else doing not so well. We were too wet for most things in February-April and too hot too early for most of them. The carrots produced pretty well despite a lot of cutworm issues but I'm moving them to the Peter Rabbit Garden next year to a raised bed with better soil. Warm-season crops produced exceptionally well for the most part. I planted most warm-season crops about a month early in order to take advantage of the very early last freeze and very early warm temperatures, and that strategy paid off. Bush beans produced huge loads of beans by late April and early May, depending on the variety and the DTM, and kept me busy picking, cooking and freezing them. Summer squash produced huge loads from late April through last week. As soon as I stopped watering, they were done, done, done. Pole beans produced moderately well, but the blister beetles and grasshoppers ate them down to bare stems in July, so they're done. I'd hoped they'd make it to fall, but since the pests ate all their leaves, that's not going to happen. Pickling cukes produced very well, particularly in the absence of cucumber beetles which usually spread disease like bacterial wilt to them. Spider mites hit them hard, and I stopped watering them a while back and they quickly died. I was able to can many pints of pickles and pickle relish, so it was a successful pickling year. The Armenian cukes produced well until the temps being hitting 110 and I stopped watering. We had so many that I deliberately left many on the vines to get huge and I would harvest one or two big gigantic ones every day to cut in half for the chickens. By the time they were that size they were more like the true melons they are, and the chickens adored them. I think there is only one left on the last vine now, and I'm going to give it to the chickens tomorrow.I give the Armenian cukes a lot of credit with helping keep the chickens hydrated and helping them survive the 110-degree-plus heat on many days. Unlike last year when we lost a lot of chickens in the heat, they all have survive so far, which is a great relief. Cantaloupes have been astonishing in their productivity considering how hot and dry it has been. We've harvested about 25 or 30 total so far and have another 6 or 8 that are likely to ripen before the plants die. There's a part of me that wants to keep watering them, but it is so hot that I don't know if they'd keep producing even if I did water them. Okra has done well though it has wilted badly pretty much every day for the last 6 weeks despite being well-watered. I believe Jing Orange produced earliest, followed closely by Little Lucy and Mammoth Green, which I believe is a green velvet type with those really long narrow pods. Beck's Big Buck has produced the most pods per plant, and since the pods are huge (wide and fat), you can make a good meal off of just a few pods. Stewart's Zeebest seemed to stall in the middle of the summer but is producing very well now. I probably planted them closer together than I should have. Watermelons are the best they've been in quite a few years. I grew the reliable mini-melons that set fruit well in limited space: Blacktail Mountain, Yellow Doll and Yellow Baby. Amish Moon and Stars perished in the Three Sisters Garden after I stopped watering it about a month ago. It has less-well-improved soil and just couldn't hold moisture. I'll work harder on that soil in the fall. Winter squash is one of the few things continuing to perform well in the absence of water. We have 'Seminole' running all over the place, the Waltham Butternut has produced early and often, and one Cornfield Pumpkin is still hanging in there and doing well without irrigation. The 'Tahitian Melon' winter squash did well as long as it was well-watered, but has not done as well as the others in the absence of water. Southern peas have struggled all summer because the pests have just eaten them back to the ground over and over. They are still putting out new growth despite the lack or irrigation or rainfall and trying to survive. We'll see how they do. The same is true of Lima Beans. My Fowler beans outlasted even Rattlesnake, though Rattlesnake did well until the grasshoppers ate all the foliage. The grasshoppers either didn't like the Fowler foliage as much or Fowlder rebounded more quickly because the foliage just kept growing and growing. Fowler set new beans until a couple of weeks ago, so it will be a regular in the garden now. Peppers--fearing drought I went with a fairly conservation pepper planting and tried to put as many of them as possible in a new raised bed at the NW corner of the garden that would get shade beginning around 3 p.m. The jalapenos of all types and 'Chichen Itza' habaneros have produced loads and loads of peppers. I've frozen about 20 dozen roasted jalapenos for winter cooking, and still am picking a few dozen peppers a week. I've canned some and used a lot in salsa in addition to what we've been eating fresh. The sweet peppers have struggled with sunscald and also have remained smaller than usual,but they have produced in this weather so I cannot complain. Tomatoes have produced better this year than in at least 5 or 6 years, being outstanding in every area--earliness, great fruit size, great flavor, huge yields and relatively little fruit issues like cracking. Some of the cherry tomato plants continue to bloom and set new fruit even in these temperatures, which is pretty amazing. Despite lots of spider mite issues and some PM issues when it rained heavily at the begining of June, the tomatoes thrived and I believe the spider mite numbers now are dropping so some plants outlasted them. There was a lot of Early Blight after the very late May/very early June rainfall, but most plants survived it, and the ones that did not already had produced heavily before I yanked them out. The tomato plants in the containers by the garage are the only ones I'm watering and I am hoping to keep them going for fall. I'm fighting blister beetles on them, but may be winning that war. The herbs have done well, with most of them being more heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant than you'd expect. I grew decorative gourds on the garden fence and should have a dozen or two for autumn decorations. I'd hoped to have more, but there were in the dry Three Sisters bed and their foliage is wilting badly and I'm just hoping they are far enough along that they don't sunscald. I've been working hard on my tomato grow list for 2013 while 2012 is fresh on my mind. Many of the new ones I tried this year were not winners, but a few were. I will focus on trying new (to me) types of paste tomatoes next year, having found a pretty solid lineup of beefsteaks, slicers and bite-sized ones over the years, but not such an engraved-in-stone list of paste types yet. The more time I spend processing paste tomatoes, the more I want to grow the really large ones. It is less work to process fewer, larger ones than tons of small ones, but the flavor has to be there or the size doesn't matter. Yardlong beans grew and produced really well, but I am not as impressed with their flavor as I'd like to be so I may not plant them next year. I started southern peas and bush beans for fall and have been watering them. They're under row covers to keep the pests off of them. They're looking pretty good considering the heat. I don't know if I'll keep watering them. It all depends on fires. If we don't have a lot of big fires in August that take me away all day every day like last year, I may be able to keep the beans and southern peas and container tomatoes going. If I get busy with fires, I may not. So far, the horrendous raging wildfires that have ravaged parts of our state are not happening here. Our fires have, for the most part, been pretty easy to contain. We are getting drier and drier by the day, so I am not sure if that will continue. Overall, despite the tremendous heat and the abnormally dry summer, the garden produced very well. The limited amount of fruit we have produced very well and I'd like to plant more fruit for future years, but that will mean more fencing because the wild things like the fruit as much as we do. It is a great fig year, so for breakfast most days I have cantaloupe and figs. That has made it a memorably sweet summer. Disease was only an issue when it rained, so I haven't had many disease issues. Dawn

My first experience with goats was one summer when I worked for the American Sunday School Association, in the Appalachians of Southern Ohio. I stayed with a missionary and his family and helped with five day clubs. The missionary's grown son still lived at home and was seeing a young lady who had goats. One day he drove over to her place, in one of those little red sports cars with a black vinyl roof.... While he was sitting with her, in the living room (minding his p's & q's) he looked out the window to see the goats ON TOP of his car, pulling the vinyl off its frame! The "p's & q's" were temporarily forgotten! Nevertheless I have concluded, after about 3 years raising milking goats, that the goat is one of the most practical homesteading animals, right up there with chickens and rabbits. It's just very important to have GOOD fencing. We have one wether, named Barbacoa (Spanish for BBQ) who keeps jumping fences and even leading the others into our yard. I keep fixing and improving the defenses and Barbacoa keeps finding new ways to get in. Anyway, as his name implies, his destiny is already determined. Probably next weekend he'll be relocated to the freezer. Yes, "WMD" stands for "weapons of mass destruction." Still, goats are producers of great fertilizer. Their milk is fantastic, and the meat is second to none. They are as large an animal as I would undertake butchering on my own. Goats, in spite of their mischievousness, are very winsome creatures. I could easily see how someone living alone would get VERY attached to them. The does are incredibly sweet. George