Yes Dawn, Those predictions can be wrong. We are dry here and the heat index is brutal. I have my own weather station and the heat index has already been 105. My garden is wilting everyday due to the hot and dry conditions.

Hi Dawn - Taking a break from canning are we? lol

A good portion of northern Missouri was added to the abnormally dry category and some moved into moderate drought. I'm about 20 miles south of the Missouri river and still showing as white but I think it is a very 'off' white.

We had a pretty good storm roll thru overnight and it rained hard for at least 30 minutes. My garden needed the rain badly and I'll be glad not to have to water for at least a few days. About 1/3 of my beds are currently vacant right now awaiting fall brassicas, potatoes, leeks, and green beans so at least I don't need to water all of the beds for the time being.

Wait. How am I not (at least) abnormally dry?!

Robert, How can you be dry when you get about 100 inches of rain per year? All kidding aside, your soil drains too fast. My garden wilts daily too, so you know, in an odd way (since misery loves company), I'm glad I'm not the only one with that issue so early in the summer. We only went up to 96 (at our mesonet station) and 97 (at our house) but our heat index was 110. That's ridiculous, and it is at least the second time this year we've had a heat index that high. I feel a miserable summer coming on. The bigger problem is that it isn't cooling of much at night. When it is something like 85 when you go to sleep and 77 when you wake up, then you know the plants and animals outdoors didn't get much of a break.

Hi Jack, I didn't do any food preservation today. Yay! I do have a big pile of tomatos, peppers and squash staring at me as I type this, so tomorrow is going to be all about food preservation. Probably Saturday too. It will be too hot to be outdoors, so I might as well be in the kitchen.

I'm glad you got rain. Things are getting pretty bad here. Last week some vehicle on I-35 either was dragging a chain or had a tire shedding pieces that started several fires alongside the road from mile marker 27 to mile marker 16. Even the green grass was burning (and making tons of smoke) and it was windy, so the firefighters were working hard to try to stop those fires. To have that happen this time of the year, when we usually are enjoying our two rainiest months of May and June is just bizarre. I noticed all the firefighters are wound up and quickly doing vehicle maintenance, buying supplies, etc. to gear up for a very early start to the summer fire season. It seems like there wasn't much of a break this year between the winter fire season and the summer fire season. It is almost like we skipped Spring. I have to hurry and finish all my canning as soon as possible because it is impossible for me to leave when the pagers go off if I am in the middle of a canning batch. I weeded a little today but then gave it up. We have too many venomous snakes and the plantings in the garden are so thick now that I cannot see where I am putting my hand when I weed, so it officially now is too dangerous to weed, which makes me crazy. Every time I put my hand down to pull a weed today, I worried a snake was going to strike it from the shadows or from beneath the plants. I just cannot function that way, so the weeds will be trying to take over now.

Hazel, The guys who track the moisture levels are monitoring broad trends (and we in our gardens are monitoring the more narrow trend of moisture on our own places) and have certain parameters they follow.

If you read the OK Mesonet's Daily Ticker, Gary McManus often drops hints about what is coming. If I picked up on his hints correctly, y'all are going to move into drought pretty quickly if you don't get some good rainfall very soon, and he didn't seem to indicate that he thought that sort of rainfall is in the works for central OK.

Right now he is using the term Flash Drought because we have progressed into it fairly quickly. I believe the kind we have in our county would be the Flash Drought caused by a lack of precipitation. Some years we get the other kind of Flash Drought---the one where rainfall (on paper, anyway) has been adequate but the onset of persistent, extreme heat is causing so much moisture evaporation from the ground (and, I guess, the accompanying excessive transpiration by the plants) that an area progresses quickly into drought caused more by the heat than a lack of moisture.

Often I feel like we are progressing to the next drought level well ahead of it showing up on the Drought Monitor map, but I do think we gardeners (and farmers and ranchers) are more sensitive to perceived dryness than the average person.

I've always said that by the time the Drought Monitor finally puts us in the Abnormally Dry category, it already is so dry that I can keep the garden plants alive with irrigation but that I cannot keep them producing. So, it hurts my gardener's heart to see we have moved into Moderate Drought. It was bad enough being Abnormally Dry. It is early in the summer for this, and the plants still are producing pretty well from the Spring rainfall, though we're extremely short. I think we're about 8" below normal and that's a horrible way to go into the summer. If this heat and dryness continue, I don't know how long the garden will continue to produce well.

Once the canning is done, tomato plants are expendable except for a couple for fresh eating. The onions are beyond needing water, so I don't have to water them. Even the asparagus probably can get by without irrigation. Everything else, though, will need water and I cannot abandon the perennial bed along the driveway because it has several new perennials growing in it this year.

I tried to group all the heat lovers together in the back garden so that, if I have to, I can stop watering the front garden (except for the perennials) and only water the back garden. It just kills me to do that, but continuing drought and 2 large garden spots force hard decisions to be made.

I am having to make water puddles daily for the visiting ducks, Augustus the turkey, the wild birds, the frogs and turtles and the bunnies, deer and wildlife. Tomorrow I'll drag out the old green Mr. Turtle sandbox that we use as a wildlife waterer in drought and fill it with water for the wild things. As the water in the ponds and creeks get low and the water is sort of stagnant and gross, the wild things flock to the Mr. Turtle. It is sort of comical to watch. Animals that normally sort of avoid one another will stand side by side in the evening and drink as soon as all our animals and people are indoors. I can watch them from inside the house if I put Mr. Turtle close enough or at least at the right angle.

I am not ready for drought. Really not ready. Only 1.26% of the state is in drought and I live within that 1.26%. That irritates me, but I guess the garden and I will just keep on going for as long as we can and we'll keep hoping for (but not expecting) rain.

Dawn

That is irritating, Dawn. It seems like y'all get only extremes when it comes to rain.

It's pretty miserable here. We walked the dogs, and while I appreciate the clouds, it was/is so muggy. I felt like I couldn't breathe. Pretty sure the dogs were feeling the same way. The chickens were panting on their roosts when I closed their door. I opened both side windows (covered by hardware cloth) so maybe they can get a breeze.

We are scheduled to tear off the outside shed walls this Saturday--the hottest day of the year. Great. We have to get that coop built though. We took out the inside walls last weekend. Tearing out sheetrock is nasty work. And insulation too.

My garden isn't as big and we have well water. I'll try to keep it going for as long as I can.

Does anyone remember a rare wet July? Or August? Honestly, I didn't start paying attention to those sort of things until 2011.

Things I think I remember is the 1994 or 1995 summer being fairly cool. And 1998 being very hot.