Hi Wantonamara, Welcome to the forum. The drought, heat and fire situation are scary and have been for months now. It is just that everything seems to be escalating almost out of control now in terms of heat, drought, and plants that are going dormant or dying---whether they are native or not. If it is any consolation, I don't want to do anything outside either. I try to do my gardening chores and animal feeding chores very early and very late. Otherwise I attempt to hibernate inside the air-conditioned house. I agree that we have reached the point in most of TX and OK that mowing can be dangerous in terms of sparking a fire. I think it is more dangerous to not mow, so I'd mow, but with a water hose hooked up and ready to go and a bucket of water very close by to where I was mowing, and a rake, shovel and wet burlap bag or other heavy-duty cloth all close to hand. I'd keep a cell phone handy too so I could call 9-1-1 right away if a fire sparked. We are seeing incredibly rapid spread rates here with grassfires, and once they are up and running, they can get into brush and trees very quickly and become full-fledged wildland fires. For about 2 weeks now, I've been watching fires spread more quickly than I've ever seen any fire move in summer. They are moving as if being pushed by 35 to 50 mph winds even though on most days the wind is in the single digits. I'd mow closest to the house and work my way outward if I could so you always have the shortest grass between your house on the one hand and your tractor/mower and the tall grass on the other. Often people start out at the farthest point and work their way inward, but during high fire danger, that's a big risk. Having said all that, if I had those brush piles, and especially because they do contain cedar, I'd consider plowing a WIDE firebreak around the property if that is possible, or at least around all the structures. We've been having very bad fires in the western half of our county this month and you wouldn't believe how many people have started plowing firebreaks around either the entire property or the structures or even both---the outer firebreak just inside the fenceline and the inner firebreak around all the structures. The closer people live to the site of a recent fire, the more likely they are to be out plowing wide firebreaks. A few ranchers are plowing up entire fields. I am not sure if it is for fire prevention or other purposes. (It certainly is far too early and too dry to be plowing in order to plant winter wheat here.) The time to decide to cut back dry landscaping near the house is not when a fire is a few hundred yards away, but rather somewhat earlier than that. I hope it is not a choice I ever have to make. We have worked so hard to plant nice trees that will eventually shade the house quite nicely and I do not want to sacrifice them for fire prevention if I can avoid doing so. We have limbed up all our trees, except for the fruit trees, so that the lowest limbs are 8' above ground in order to keep fire out of the crowns. One thing that anyone with a house in an area prone to wildfire might want to consider is to buy a homeowners kit of sprayable fire retardant that can be sprayed with a simple garden hose. You can spray-coat your house or whatever else you wish to protect in just a few minutes. It isn't terribly inexpensive, but protecting our home with it would cost less than paying the deductible on our homeowner's insurance policy. When fire is near my house, I focus on wetting down the ground on whatever side the fire is approaching from. Other than that, I try to get all the cats and dogs in the house so they are as safe as they can be as long as the house stays safe. Finally, I make sure the car is already parked facing the street and ready to go in case I have to make a run for it. To be honest, when we moved here, wildfire was the last thing on our minds. We've seen several horrid droughts and fire seasons since then, and we have an 'escape plan' in place. You have to. If the fire is close enough you can see flame or smoke, it is too late to be making decisions about what to do----you need to be doing it! Stay safe everyone. We had three fire calls today. That's right. Three in one day. Except in the worst of drought years, that just doesn't happen. It is happening now. There are many, many fire retardants available for use by fire departments, insurance companies (some insurance comapnies hire fire protection companies to come in and spray homes when a fire is approaching, if time permits), and even homeowners. You can find them by Googling, but I'll link one below to get you started. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Thermo-Gel Fire Retardant

Dawn's been livin right!

We're not always dry. We were an ocean last year! lol Granted that was an extremely rare, perhaps never to be repeated event. Imagine beating your own maximum annual rainfall record by 20". It seems incredible that it even could happen, doesn't it? It is the droughts that get me. It doesn't even matter how much rain we have prior to summer, as heat + low or no rainfall = abnormally dry or drought conditions in just a couple of weeks. When we go from wet and green to dry and brown really quickly, the conditions usually have evolved into a Flash Drought. I don't know how well Flash Droughts are studied and understood, but I know we have two kinds of them---the kind that comes when rain just stops. Just completely stops. The other kind is when we go suddenly get really, really hot and the heat just sucks up all the moisture out of the soil. I cannot tell that one kind is any worse than the other. This year we seemed to have the kind that comes from rain just stopping in early June, because we went a month without rain and got really dry and hot. Then rain fell and we greened up, but we have green grass burning, so I think the heat is continuing the development of a flash drough that began when rain stopped falling. If we don't get rain over the next few days, I think things could turn really bad really quickly. Driving through our county from south to north yesterday, I noticed that some areas (clearly the ones where the rain didn't fall 2 weeks ago) are painfully dry. If anyone in our county gets rain this week, I hope it is them.

Very light rain is falling on and off here. You can barely see it on the radar (at least as of the last time I looked) but you can see it and feel it. That should give y'all some hope that the rain is coming. Melissa, Fires like that are scary. In all but the worst winds (like April 9, 2009, when we had a bad fire day literally all over the state with winds gusting at least in the 60s), the fire departments usually have great success protecting homes. It gets really dicey, though, on high wind days. The fires in the Gatlinburg, TN, area this week are a reminder to us all that we need family fire evacuation plans in place just in case we suddenly find a strong, wind-driven fire pushing into our neighborhoods. It is just human nature to think it never will happen to us, but it happens to people just like us all too often and we are not immune to it. Back in 2011, we fought fires almost daily for months on end (and sometimes multiple wildfires per day), and every morning I looked at the forecast, especially the wind portion of it, and calculated how I'd evacuate the animals and myself if fire was headed our way. We had fires on the property adjacent to ours at least twice that year and it was nerve-wracking. I expect all of you who are further north than Leslie and I will have a worse fire year than we'll have because y'all have been so dry. We aren't immune here to the fires at all, but the fact we have had average to above-average rainfall this year does gives us better soil moisture and helps a little bit. Really, once all the vegetation is dry and either dead or dormant, though, anything can happen. I have watched the drought in the southeastern USA all year with increasing alarm, and what once was scattered wildfires here and there now has morphed into massive fires in the SE. They haven't had a big fire outbreak type of year in a long time so there's lots of fuel. I hope they get tons of rain to calm down the situation. My heart goes out to all the folks affected by these wildfires. It is heartbreaking to think of the lives lost in the Gatlinburg TN area. Oklahoma's own winter fire season outlook is pretty bleak and we all need to be prepared for wildfires too. The darker your area's color on the drought map, the higher your fire risk likely will be. The drought type conditions are moving our way both from the east of Oklahoma and from the west. You can see it here on the USA Drought Monitor Map: USA Drought Monitor Map I hope this isn't a sign that next year will be dry because a lot of you are in areas that already are far too dry as it is. Dawn