I've linked the two-day rainfall map below. I am not sure how many areas, if any, got enough rain this weekend to drop their county back to a lower category, but it is possible someone might have. The portion of Love County in which we live has dropped back two categories in about 3 weeks, so I think some of you might drop back one category in the next week or two. Here is a link that might be useful: Mesonet 2-Day Rainfall Map

Jay, I wonder that myself about y'all showing up as moderate. I know that for each region the classification varies depending on what they consider "normal". There have been times I've looked at Love County being classified as "moderate" and stomped my foot and had my own private hissy fit because it was so dry the NATIVE plants were dying. To me, it seems it would take more than "moderate" drought to kill native plants. By the time they move an area to the "extreme" drought classification, the agricultural producers already have lost about all they can lose. By the time an area makes it to "exceptional" drought (I believe we hit that level in Love County in 2003 and know we reached it in the drought of 2005-2006), there is pretty much no moisture in the soil whatsoever no matter how deeply you dig. There's no water in the ponds. The springs stop running. The cracks in the ground are so deep you can't see where they end, etc., etc., etc. Even worse, when we are fighting wildfires, the cedar trees seem to spontaneously burst into flame before the actual flames even reach them. In those kinds of conditions, the organic matter in soil and undertree ground roots can burn for days, leaving you with smoke that seems to spontaneously waft up right out of the ground (which, I guess, is just what is occurring). After three years of drought there where you live, I'm surprised y'all are not in at least "extreme" drought, to tell you the truth. I think the U. S. Drought Monitor sugar-coats it somewhat. We always seem worse than they think we are, and I suspect that is true of your area as well. Poor old Texas....I think they finally made it out of drought (after three years) in Feb. 2010 and now look at how deeply they're in drought again! Of course, since their drought had recently ended, they had poor groundwater reserves and I think that's how they went from hurricane-induced flooding in the summer and early autumn to such severe drought in early winter. One thing about looking at the U. S. Drought Monitor map....no matter how bad it looks where you live, there's almost always someone else whose drought is worse by comparison. The entire southern region looks pretty bad. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: U S Drought Monitor Map of Entire USA

We haven't had more than 2' total snow in any of the last 5 years here in KC. Last winter we had much more rain than snow. I always have to water some parts of the garden at various times of the growing season...usually about now when I am seeding and transplanting the fall garden is the highest use of irrigation mostly due to the heat and transpiration. Most things that are still going from the spring like tomatoes and peppers can get by on just occasional rain.

Hi Jay, I am so thrilled you got rain! I hope you get more and I hope it is helping your plants. What's up with cool mornings at this time of the year? I hope that's not a sign you'll have an early autumn that will cut short your garden's chance to produce. We are supposed to be cooler for a few days beginning around Saturday, but then back in the upper 90s by mid-week of next week. At least we made it back into the Abnormally Dry category, which is somewhat better then being in the Moderate Drought category, but not much. I watered my garden a couple of days ago, and yet everything was badly wilted yesterday, perhaps from the heat more than from being dry....but.....we are about 6 or 7" below average annual rainfall anyway so watering just doesn't seem to help much. All summer we have dance back and forth in our county from Modertate Dry to Abnormally Dry every couple of weeks. I guess that started in May, which was terribly dry. I was sitting here this morning, listening to the rooster crowing in the coop, looking out at grass that was really green last week and that now is browning out already and wondering how much longer I go on watering and trying to keep the plants happy. I was contemplating whether to stop watering the front garden except for the perennial flowers, peppers and fall tomatoes and if I maybe should just keep watering the back. The plants out back were planted later and are hot weather stuff so they're just beginning to produce well. A lot of the stuff in the ground in the front garden has been there for months and already has produced a lot. I decided to water the back garden again this morning to keep the okra and cucumbers happy and to defer the decision about watering the front garden another day. I don't mind watering if I can water enough to keep the garden producing, but the front garden is starting to look pretty sad even though it is being watered and, when in drought, that's a bad sign. It is like the 3" of rain that fell over the first few days of July never happened as we are back to being viciously dry already. I'm trying not to get panicky over how little watering seemed to help the front garden. It did perk up the garden for 1 day---barely 1 day. That's not enough because I'm certainly not going to water every day. Decisions, decisions, decisions! I think that in tomorrow morning's slightly cooler weather, I'll start pulling out most of the first two rows of tomato plants. They went into the ground in mid-March, produced heavy crops in May and June and look sickly and tired now. They are less than 1/2 of my spring tomato plants, and while a few still have fruit, we have so many stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs now that the fruit are getting to where they are barely worth picking. The next bed, which also has 2 rows of tomatoes, looks better so I might leave them a while longer to let them finish maturing the fruits on the plants. Not having to water the one bed of tomatoes would reserve more water for something else---like the melons that I'm trying to keep alive and productive without to much watering since I don't want to water down the flavor. Despite having all that rain early in July, we've had a couple of grass fires since then. I wasn't expecting that, and it might be more accurate to call them hay field fires because I think in each case maybe a hay bale erupted into flames and started the fire. I'm not sure why. I think the hay was baled before the rain came and we'd been good and dry for quite a while so I wouldn't have thought the moisture content inside the bales was high enough to lead to combustion and a fire. If it is not that, then I don't know why the bales started burning. I'd just like to take a nice long nap and wake up in September with cooler temperatures and rain actually falling from the sky regularly in amounts that do some good for more than just a few days. The folks in central OK are much worse off than we are because most of them didn't get anything close to the 3" we got, and I don't know how gardens are alive and producing in the flash drought without a heroic amount of watering. Dawn