Feb 2018, Week 4, Planting (Maybe) & Welcoming March
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years ago
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jlhart76
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoRelated Discussions
January 2018, Week 4, The January Thaw, Warmth, Wind, Fire, Seeds...
Comments (101)Jennifer, The first time I saw a BP truck at our Wal-mart, which was just last week, it was only delivering wooden shipping crates of BP onions, but then it was back this week delivering a few cool-season herbs and veggies. I'm thinking of those poor little plants right now because our OK Mesonet station is showing a current temperature of 20 degrees and that's pretty much borderline too cold for some of the plants I saw yesterday, especially given how small they are and the fact they are in small containers and not in the ground where soil temperatures could help insulate them from some of the effects of the cold. I hope the garden center employees covered up those plants last night or moved them indoors. While the very early transplant arrivals often do not freeze or have damage at 20 degrees, sometimes they do....and sometimes the damage is invisible and can result in later problems like early bolting or buttonheading of brassicas....and no one links that bolting or buttonheading in March or April to the fact that the plants were exposed to excessively cold temperatures while on the garden center shelves in late January or early February. I'm sorry your mom has the flu and wish her a speedy recovery. I hope whatever you're fighting is not the flu and that you can successfully repel those germs. I carry hand sanitizer in my purse, not that I am obsessive about it, but I hate touching anything in a grocery store at this time of the year for fear that flu and cold germs are lingering everywhere. I wash my hands constantly, and I do not understand how/why people would use a public restroom facility and not wash their hands. I just don't get it. Rebecca, Well, spinach is really cold hardy. Perhaps dew and/or frost have left enough moisture behind to induce germination. We're in severe drought, are awfully dry and have tons of tiny little green things sprouting everywhere now. In fact, the OK Mesonet's Relative Greenness for our county went from 11% last week to 21% this week, which surprised me, but then when I looked at the ground closely, I could see all the tiny green sprouts popping up in fields, and clearly the program (satellite? radar?) that calculates Relative Greenness for each county is 'seeing' that greenup as well. Are any of y'all allergic to cedar (which actually is juniper, but I cannot win that battle on getting people to correctly label it)? Because it is pollinating down here already and everyone who is allergic to it is having allergy symptoms already, including Tim and I. Just yesterday I was looking at cedars in our neighborhood and commenting to Tim how heavily they're covered in pollen, and Fran and I noticed the same thing while out at wildfires in northern Love County a few days ago. A lot of folks who recovered from the flu now thing they are having a relapse or have caught a cold or whatever, and I just wonder if what's actually happening is they are allergic to the cedar pollen. Nancy, We all are so proud of Amber. She's just an awesome person and her students are so lucky to have a teacher who loves them and works so hard to teach them. Everything she does is always for them and about them, so when she was named Teacher of the Year, she was totally surprised because she doesn't think about stuff like that---her focus is completely on her kids. The riding mower is dead.....or dying. It is around 16 or 17 years old and gets used a lot since we mow about 2 acres regularly. I think it really needed to be retired 3-5 years ago, but Tim is a cheapskate who doesn't want to spend the money to buy another one, so he keeps fixing it and keeps it limping along and just barely working. I just kinda wish he'd go ahead and buy a new one and have something reliable. Weekends are too short as it is and he doesn't get much mowing done if half the weekend is spent chasing down parts and fixing the mower. Jen, I bet it was a nice day to go to the dog park. Our dogs spent a lot more time outdoors today in their dog yard than they usually do in the winter, and they were so thrilled that it was mild, sunny and warm. They were exhausted by the end of the day which I always think is a good thing as it does cut down on how energetic they are in the evening. I think Tigger is the perfect name for a dog! I assume the planters you're planting are your winter sowing? Have fun finishing it up. Nancy, That bermuda grass is such a nuisance, and it creeps into the east end of my garden every year in late summer once it is too snaky for me to hand-weed it out. Johnson grass does the same, and it essentially is bermuda grass on steriods. Since I don't use chemical herbicides and since the presence of the rattlesnakes and copperheads makes weeding too risky after a certain point, that sort of invasion just cannot be avoided. It drives me mad. Even if I could hand-remove it, I'm willing to bet that at some point the summer weather would get too hot and I'd decide I wasn't going to spend all that time out in the heat removing it. I'll be removing all of it this week (I hope) that I can as long as the wind stays down and I am able to spend more time at home in the garden instead of being away at fires. I think on Mon and Tues, the wind will be low enough that I'll be home in the garden. I'm not so sure about Wed and Thurs because the stronger winds are expected to return then. I have been watching for snakes this week on the warmer days because last January they came out here in southern OK on the warm winter days. A little girl in the Austin, TX area was bitten by a rattlesnake at Longhorn Caverns State Park a few days ago on a warm, sunny day when the family was excited to get outdoors and have fun after being cooped up by cold weather, and that certainly caught my attention. Undoubtedly it generally is warmer in Austin than it is up here at this time of the year, but not necessarily that much warmer, so I took her mom's warning about snakes being out to be a serious one. I think your soil will be fine whether the stuff is broken down enough or not. We have gazillions of things that sprout and grow just fine in some pretty awful dense, red clay.....although I'd never expect my precious garden plants to survive and perform well in that stuff. It is merely that as the soil gets better via amending, the plant performance improves year after year. I've always been in it for the long haul---not expecting to totally turn around the soil in 3, 5 or even 10 years, but just dedicated to continually improving it slowly over time. There's places in my garden that probably never get as much compost as I'd like, but the plants grow well there anyway. I do look at the improved soil now and have trouble remembering how truly awful it was in the beginning---but all I have to do is dig down maybe a foot to get beneath the area of improved soil and there's my reminder of the awful red clay we started out with. We only eat out about once a week, something made easier by the fact that it is pretty much too long of a drive to go anywhere that we'd really like to eat, and eating out usually is restricted to the weekend anyway since Tim's long commute makes his day incredibly long as it is. By the time he walks in the door at night, he's been gone 13 or 14 hours and going out to eat is not on his list of things he wants to do....and I don't blame him. I am hoping for a better week this week than last week when we had fires virtually every day. Having said that, we're off to a bad start, with the fire pagers going off for a vehicle in the roadway on fire about a mile from our house around 4 a.m. this morning. I am sure there's tons and tons I do not understand about motor vehicles, but I just do not understand how you're driving up the road at 4 a.m. and all of a sudden your car or truck bursts into flames. That must be a terrifying moment when you realize you're in a vehicle that is on fire. So, now that I am up and wide awake, there's no way I can fall back asleep. Tim, by contrast, can crawl back into bed after something like that and be asleep and snoring in 5 minutes. I wish I could fall back asleep like that, but it just doesn't happen---once I'm awake, I'm awake to stay. This is useful in summer because I just go outdoors at the break of day to get into the garden early and beat the heat, but not so useful in winter when it is cold outdoors. Dawn...See MoreMay 2018, Week 1......Finally Safe To Plant it All?
Comments (94)Our internet service is back (it was the service provider, not us, who had technical issues after the storms) so I'm playing catchup and working my way backwards from the most recent posts. Amy, They all were rooted....they were branches that were creeping and crawling along on top of the mulch and putting down roots. So, yours should have had roots somewhere. Our dogs and chickens never have bothered tomato plants, so I suspect the plant parts taste bad---deer will eat them though. It sounds like you and your Wild Women of Owasso had fun. That dog needs the biggest most gigantic rawhide bone y'all can find---something the size of a tractor tire perhaps---so she'll have something to chew and maybe, just maybe, then she'll leave your plants alone. I haven't seen a true golden viola, but...California has a native viola that is golden, so it seems to me like someone could have bred a golden viola out of it. Also, there are some pansies that are golden yellow and the violas are close cousins to pansies, so it seems reasonable to think you could have a golden yellow viola. All the yellow violas I've grown have been more of a lemon or pale lemon yellow though. Nancy, We're so rural that I actually am amazed that the WiFi works 99.5% of the time. Typically, if we are forecast to get severe weather, I'm not extremely worried about hail, wind or tornadoes because they are only slim possibilities that might occur. The sure things that will occur if we have a severe thunderstorm? First, the Satellite TV will freeze and then go out. That will last until the storm has moved on. After the TV goes out, it is somewhat likely that the internet will go out too. It doesn't always, but when it does, we always have to wait a day or two to get it back. At some point, the power will flicker off and then come back on. This is only a minor annoyance. Only once in the 19 years we've been here have we lost power for even 4 hours, and that was just last year. Prior to that, our longest power outage had been only 2.5 hours. So, it is briefly annoying, but our local electric co-op guys are awesome and are out there working to fix things the very minute they know something is wrong. This morning, while we were at CostCo, Tim called our internet service provider to check on the outage and they said it was them and not us and that they had fixed it this morning. Sure enough, when we got home, it was working again. Long, long ago--probably 2001 or 2002, Tim figured out that as soon as I had empty plant flats, I'd start more seeds. Still, I think it took him a couple more years to realize that I constantly start more seeds from February through June no matter what. It wasn't as obvious when we had a smaller light shelf with only three shelves that only held 3 flats. Now that we have a larger one that holds a lot more flats, it is a bit more obvious when more plantless flats appear on the shelves that I have started a new round of seed-starting. I have a lot of flats sitting in the garden waiting to be planted. Then, I have a few more flats on the table outside the sunroom---mostly waiting to go into the back garden when I get the front one finished. Then, on the baker's rack in the mudroom, I have 3 or 4 more flats of flower seeds I just started yesterday, also for the back garden. I'll move those outside tomorrow so the flowers can sprout and grow in full sun from day one. I just don't want to move them out until today's rain has ended. Even after I have planted every square inch of space that is safely fenced off from the deer, I'll have succession crops of one sort or another started in flats. It is what I do. When I yank out a crop that is at the end of its productive life, I have small seedlings in flats ready to put into that space, so we have bare space for just hours, not days. Eventually, at some point, it gets too hot for me to care, so I rarely start new seeds in flats after June. Until then, it is just a seed-starting merry-go-round here. Jennifer, I see those strange black boxes sporadically, but they always go away quickly, so I think it is Houzz/GW and not your computer or mine. Coral honeysuckle grows fast in good soil and with good moisture. Mine doesn't grow much in bad drought years, but I planted it in unimproved clay....though I think that years of decomposing mulch should have improved the soil a lot by now. Still, it holds its own even with temperatures well above 100 degrees and no rain for 4-6 weeks straight. I only water it if it wilts, which it seldom does. A year from now, you won't believe how big yours has grown. Jacob, It is very common for our part of our county to get caught in a dry slot (I don't know why) and to have rain falling to our west and east simultaneously and completely missing us. I've learned to live with it. Once, when I met the spouse of a forum member at one of the Spring Flings, he asked which part of this county we lived in. I started to describe it in general terms and he said "Oh, you're in that dry area that the rain always misses" and he could describe our area right down to the road names. Turns out he worked for several years on a custom wheat harvesting crew and had been in our county fairly often. At least while other parts of our county had flooding roadways and power outages on Wednesday, we were fine---albeit dry. When it finally rained here yesterday, the same folks that had heavy rain the day before got heavy rain again....and more flooding, etc. Some of them had small hail on Wednesday and I was relieved that missed us too. We didn't even have enough rain for our part of the county to flood---though some roads a mile or two north of us did flood. It is hard to be patient and wait for the rain to find us, but yesterday it finally found us. Now we're wet and muddy, but at least we didn't have storm damage. Nancy, I wanted asparagus until I had it. I really, really wanted it and knew it needed great soil as it is a long-lived crop, so I waited until I had improved the heck out of the soil for almost 10 years before I planted it. This was especially important because it is at the northern end of a sloping garden, so the runoff all runs from the higher southern end of the garden to the lower northern end. So, now we have it and I am starting to think of it as a garden thug and starting to hate it. It grows like mad. I really think a lot of the irritation is a timing issue. In late winter/early spring when I am busy with wildfires and trying to plant and torn in two by the need to try to find time to do both, there that asparagus is, sprouting and growing like mad daily and demanding that I must drop everything right that minute and harvest it before it gets too tall. Once you harvest it, you must eat it, preserve it, etc. and then the next day there's a whole new crop of spears saying "Harvest me, harvest me....". The other irritant is that once you've harvested for a couple of months, there it sits, blowing around in the wind, flopping over into pathways, providing a natural trellis for bindweed to climb and just taking up space for the rest of the year......so, in some future year, if my asparagus mysteriously disappears, no one should be shocked. The only thing that will kill it is to cut it down to the ground repeatedly over months or sometimes years so it cannot grow and store energy for the next year. If I get tired enough of it, I'll do that. I'd just dig it out, but it has been there a long time and all the roots are grown together in one gigantic mass---it would take a backhoe to dig it out, and I'm not letting a backhoe get near my garden. I keep hoping the voles will eat it, but nope, they only want to eat things that I do not want them to eat. It is too late to plant more edible podded peas. They perform best at cooler temperatures---say when highs are lower than 75. The higher you go above 75 degrees, the more they begin to fade. Mine seem to stay fine as long as the highs are only through the mid-80s, but once we start hitting the 90s (usually that happens here in May), they begin to get powdery mildew and, no matter what you try for the PM, the pea pods are diseased and not fit to eat. So, when PM hits, I harvest all I can, yank out the plants and replace them with something that loves the heat. For years, I tried to fight the PM and keep the peas growing, but the PM hits the pods almost before it hits the foliage, so that was pointless. Often, since the edible podded peas are trellised, I plant icebox melons in their place when I remove them because the icebox melons can climb the trellis and produce marvelously on it. That is a space saver for me. You also could replace your peas when the time comes with a vining form of cucumbers, Armenian cucumbers, southern peas, lima beans (produce better in the heat for me than regular pole beans), yard-long beans, malabar spinach, vining types of squash or gourds or mini-pumpkins. or the vining annual flower of your choice. You can plant a fall crop of peas in late summer for an autumn harvest. Generally you'll get a great harvest of fall peas if you plant them about 10 weeks before the date of your average first frost of autumn. They will produce until your temperatures hit the mid-20s, at which time the plants do not necessarily die---but the cold can make the flowers abort, which sort of wrecks your chance of getting a harvest. Amy, Not to burst your okra bubble, but every single person I know who grows okra thinks that their variety is the absolute best and absolute most special okra in the world---far better than everyone else's. I don't know why. Perhaps because okra, when it is happy, can outcompete, outlast and outproduce everything else in the garden in the heat and the drought conditions. (Although it will do better with regular water.) So, folks who grow cowhorn okra think it is the best and the most special. Folks who grow green velvet think the same thing about that variety. Folks who grow one of the orange or red varieties (they all look red to me, regardless of the fact that at least one of them has orange in its name) think they are far superior to others, etc. People who grow Heavy Hitter are sure it is the best, and folks who grow Stewart's Zeebest think it is the best. I have grown a lot of okra varieties some years in order to compare them to one another, and they all did well enough. For what it is worth, I haven't had sharpshooters in OK. Maybe they are more of a TX thing. Kim, I hope you're feeling better and I hope the first market tomorrow is a big success! Tim is back from Salt Lake City, y'all, and I 'think' that was his last work-related trip for the next few months. The dogs were delirious with job when he walked into the house and wouldn't give him a moment of peace last night. One dog or another had to be almost in his lap or leaning against him for the rest of the evening. Thinking about how many times he has had to travel lately, I asked him 'do any of y'all ever work a week in the office?' (referring to him and the other three assistant chiefs), and he thought about it and said "not really". lol. Even when they are in town, they're constantly at multi-agency meetings, planning sessions, conferences, police academy graduation ceremonies, legislative lobbying sessions, FBI Academy classes, etc. I told him today that "while the men are gone away to play, it is the women (their administrative assistants) who are in the office running the show", and he was forced by his own honesty to agree with me. It is good to have him home. We went out for breakfast today and did our usual CostCo shopping run on Friday instead of Saturday, and we did it in the rain. There was a method to my madness, though, because I figured if we did all the errands and shopping chores today (and we did) in the rain, then tomorrow on a beautiful sunny day with highs in the 80s, we could (and will) go plant shopping. That is called planning ahead! Had the rain stopped, I would have dragged him and the carload full of supplies and groceries to a few favorite nurseries, but the rain didn't stop until we were almost home, so tomorrow I get to go plant shopping with an empty car trunk. I'm not looking for normal stuff tomorrow like run-of-the-mill bedding plants, but more for special accent plants for the containers or for perennials for the hummingbirds. There is not a lot of extra space left to fill in the front garden, except for the area currently overrun with native dewberries, and I'm going to take them out, rototill that soil, rake out all the roots I can and fill up that semi-shady area with flowers. Native dewberries are the bermuda grass of the native fruit world, so they just need to be completely gone from the garden. There is one thing in the dewberries' favor---they are attempting to take over the asparagus bed. It might be interesting to see them slug it out, but two garden thugs like them is simply one to many. Today Damon Lane and NWS-Norman both posted maps showing the path of the Norman tornado the other night.......it traveled alongside and crossed Paula's road (no wonder they were in the storm shelter!), though I couldn't tell from the map how close it came to Ken's and Paula's on its 8-mile journey. Dawn...See MoreMay 2018, Week 4...The Heat Is On, Part 2
Comments (94)Good Morning, Everyone! Nancy, Bruce alerted me earlier in the day to the fact that he had rain and it was moving my way, so I started watching, but I still wasn't really believing because it always seems to veer east of us. This time it didn't veer east until it had gone south of us, so we got almost an inch of desperately needed rain. I was so thrilled. So, the garden will be happy for a few days, but I suspect the moisture won't last long in the high temperatures. This really was our first good rainfall since around May 3rd or 4th, and for once, we got more rain than our Mesonet station instead of getting a lot less than was recorded there. Lillie helped snap beans and string beans for a couple of hours. She's a hard worker and loves gardening (she has a great-grandfather with a huge garden and always has helped with the garden since she was very small). We had 4 varieties of beans all harvested together, and she was fascinated with the purple ones and loved the Provider beans, which are more flat like Romas than round, because the Providers have very obvious strings and she loves pulling the strings. She'd pick those out of the pile to string and then snap. Catmint makes me think of Yellow Cat, who we lost a few months ago at a very old age, because he was the only cat we've ever had who liked catmint more than catnip. I can hardly bear to look at the catmint right now because it makes me miss him so, but we'll always have it in the garden because some of the little beneficial insects love it. Paula, I'm sorry to hear about the seizure. I'm so glad you're okay. Did they figure out what caused it? That must have been frightening. Take that Short Term Disability and live it up in the garden! God has a plan, and maybe his plan is for you to have a few months of gardening and grandkids without any other distractions. As far as gardening in one's PJs, my experience with that is that if I venture into my garden for just a minute in my PJs, I end up staying out there in them and that will be the day the mailman brings me a package that won't fit in the mailbox and there I stand at the garden gate accepting that package while wishing a hole in the earth would open up and swallow me right up. I'm always thinking "maybe he won't think these are pajamas" but who am I kidding? Melissa, I'd been wondering where you were. You poor mama! She'll come back, you know, even if only to visit and she's very young still so they might move back here at some point. Or, their relationship might not last anyhow. Often, what you think you want at 18 is not what you discover you really want later on as you continue to mature. Chris was the same age the first time he left home (for Georgia) and he was back home in a few months. Congrats on getting through to your son about the importance of living at home for at least the first year since he lives so close to school and congrats on his scholarship. I think college is such a huge adjustment anyway, and I think he has no idea how lucky he is to be able to live at home. I am glad that you and Sassy Pants will at least have the butterfly garden. You didn't mention how your mother-in-law is doing. I hope she is okay and is in remission. Mostly we're just excited to have 3 weekend days together because Tim's workdays are so long during the week. We're going out to the dinner tonight with our son and his girlfriend at their favorite restaurant in Ardmore. That's about it for our big weekend plans. Other than that, I suppose our big plans are grocery shopping and mowing a couple of acres. It doesn't sound very exciting, but I like having all the supplies bought and put up so we don't have to make little trips to the store during the week and there's nothing like mowing the grass to help make it easier to avoid stepping on snakes at this time of the year. Rebecca, I hope the next round of rain doesn't miss you. I know exactly how it feels to watch the rain fall everywhere else except at your own place, and it isn't encouraging at all. Jennifer, Your hen sounds okay then. Her broodiness should pass and she'd get back to normal soon I imagine. I probably won't be working in the garden this weekend, y'all, because I feel like I worked so hard all week getting that pallet of mulch into the garden that I deserve a break today....and tomorrow...and maybe the next day. I weeded and mulched until I couldn't see straight any more, and the last thing I want to do for the next three days is any weeding and/or mulching. Well, I'll have to harvest so that requires going into the garden, but except for that, I'll get a break. Actually, going into the garden is dangerous because if I see new weeds sprouting, which is so common in May after rainfall, that then I feel compelled to weed. It is sort of sad to see all the cool-season stuff coming out of the garden, but it is late May, so it is time. I've already got most of the hot season crops planted, so the succession crops to fill in empty spots left by the harvest of the remaining cool-season plants (onions and potatoes) will be mostly melons of all kinds (muskmelons, watermelons, Crane melons.....) and probably some zinnias. I am working so hard, lol, to have an easier summer that I'm being very careful to not plant too many succession crops of edibles. This is hard for me to do because I have to fight my usual pattern of just planting more edibles. I'll probably plant more zinnias over time, and maybe some cosmos. You never can have too many zinnias for the butterflies in the hot summer months. The heat and general lack of adequate rainfall are encouraging me to stay on my quest for an easier summer with less time spent processing and putting up the harvest. I still have 5 large containers to fill, or maybe six, and will be plant shopping for plants for those containers either today or tomorrow. I do not understand how this tomato problem keeps happening. We have so many tomatoes piling up on the kitchen counter that we either need to eat a ton of tomatoes for three meals a day all weekend long, or I need to make some salsa or sauce or something to use them up. I cut back so much on how many tomato plants I planted that I didn't think we'd hit the 'too many tomatoes' point until at least June. I think the heat is speeding up the ripening of the tomatoes too much. I'm not complaining about having tomatoes, but just about how they all seem to ripen together at one time instead of spreading themselves out better over a longer period of time. I need to have a talk with them about that. Last night, I awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of a bunch of coyotes that sounded like they were sitting right outside our bedroom window. It was at least one adult with a bunch of babies yipping and yapping, and it was close enough to be scary. I was glad all our animals sleep indoors at night. It is more typical to hear the coyotes howling further off, though not always very far away. I don't like it when I know they're in the yard. The cottontail bunnies are very plentiful at this time of the year, so I expect Mama was teaching the babies how to hunt for their meal. Something has been roaming through the woods all day and our dogs are barking at it nonstop. I never see anything when I look for whatever they're barking at, but Princess and Ace just have a conniption fit constantly. Now I'm wondering if that mama coyote is raising her young ones in there and if our dogs are hitting on their scent. I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend, whether inside of or outside of the garden. Dawn...See MoreJuly 2018, Week 4, Fun, Fun, Fun (Third Attempt---First 2 Disappeared)
Comments (73)Jen, I bet is has been a crazy week with extra furbabies underfoot. I hope it was a fun one. Nancy, Thanks for the photo of the rain. I've just about forgotten what rain looks like. We're hoping to get some on Sunday or Monday although the amount the 7-day QPF is forecasting for us keeps dropping, choking out hope of getting good rain with each update. Last night's/this morning's rain went both north and south of us (naturally) but we got a few drops.....8' rain....one raindrop every 8 feet. This so-called rain fell for a couple of hours (in theory, because we did have wind, thunder and lightning for the entire time) but the ground still looked dry when it was done, and the rain gauge had less than 1/100th of an inch in it...so we called it a "trace" of rain. It is probable rain fell from the clouds higher above but evaporated as it came through the drier air layer down near the ground because it looked like it was raining, but we literally were not feeling it or seeing it at the ground level. Virga. That's the story of our lives lately. That is so terrible about the ping pong ball sized hail. Hail that size can do a lot of damage. The worst hail I've been in personally myself was baseball to softball sized, and experiencing that once in a lifetime was one time too many. Larry, I'm sorry for all your troubles with the incompetent medical folks who have wasted three months of your time. I know that sort of thing is very frustrating. Jennifer, I am doing my best to hang in there, thinking that if only rain...real rain, not evaporating rain, not rain that falls 3 miles north or 1/2 mile south, but actual real rain that falls on our land and wets everything down....if only.....if only it will fall in the next few days, than maybe I can keep watering and keep the blooms going for the birds, bees, butterflies, etc. We're still hitting 100 every day (105 Thursday at our house, 103 yesterday, 101 today) and not getting the rain, so the garden just roasts and roasts in this heat and dryness. We were out at a fire again yesterday...a really bad one....a 6,000 s.f. barn with animals temporarily trapped by the flames. That big metal barn was like an oven and the firefighters suffered tremendously while fighting that fire. They are tough and never quit, but a person can only take so much heat. For the second day in a row, they already had a firefighter in the ambulance by the time we arrived on the scene with water, Gatorade and more....and we were not that slow to arrive either. The heat is just that bad. I had cooked fire food (still had some in the oven when the pagers went off) all morning long, and spent the whole afternoon at the fire, so never stepped foot in my garden yesterday. I finally went in there around 7:30 or 8:00 pm tonight just to water tomatoes in containers. That is all I could manage to do today. I couldn't go to today's fire (because, of course, there was one....but Tim went) because we have the 3 year old granddaughter this weekend. Instead of playing in the dirt, I've been playing with Play Dough and Softee Dough. I know you all are jealous. Megan, If every weather guy in the state stood on their head and swore that August would be more mild....I still wouldn't believe it. Not for us. Being this far south, we rarely get the cool-downs that hit points further north, so I don't expect much relief. We usually go anywhere from 2 to 5 degrees higher than forecast anyway, so even if they forecast cooler weather, we do not necessarily see it happen. Tomorrow is supposed to be our last 100+ degree day for a week or so, and I hope they are right. Even the low 90s would feel good compared to what we've been having. They just don't seem to do a very good job forecast our high temperatures down here. We also get a lot of compressional heating as fronts pass or are approaching or whatever, and inevitably the compressional heating pushes us to higher temperatures than what was forecast. I didn't even known what compressional heating was when we moved here, but I sure do know what it is now. Y'all know how much trouble I have with venomous snakes slithering out of the woods and into the garden to eat frogs and toads and whatever.....well, yesterday, at the fire, towards the end when the firefighters were doing overhaul, they brought out a charred crispy snake, burned and blackened so badly that you couldn't tell what sort of snake it had been, but it had the pointed head......so, I felt right at home with...the snake of the day. See there, I don't even have to step foot into the garden to see snakes. We ate lunch early today at Caddo Street BBQ in Ardmore, which is a really new place. I think it opened for business on July 4th. It was amazing---the food all tasted home-made, and I do mean home-made, not like the restaurant version of home-made but like true grandma-cooked-it-in-the-kitchen home-made. They're only open from 10:30 a.m. until approximately 2:30 p.m. (closing earlier if the meat sells out early, but staying open later if they still have meat available) and we were there early to guarantee we would get fed before the place turned into a standing-room-only situation. So, if you're in line ordering your food at 10:30 a.m., I guess it is brunch more than breakfast or lunch. I would gladly eat our first meal of the day there each Saturday for the rest of our lives. It all was so good, and Saturday seems to be the one day that Tim, Chris, Jana and I all can get together. We met the owner who seems like a fine person (and he sure knows how to smoke meat) and Chris won a free t-shirt for being the first customer in line this morning (which surprised and thrilled him---he will wear that shirt with pride). So, my weekend hasn't been about gardening at all, really, and I don't care. I need a break. Whether I want a break or not is a moot point---the daily fires (which I knew were coming at some point due to the drought) will ensure I pretty much stay out of the garden for a while, I guess. I do hope I can get back into some sort of gardening schedule on Monday and at least manage to harvest daily. I think that all that is really waiting to be harvested now is a few watermelons and some okra. Thankfully, I'm growing Stewart's Zeebest---and you can let it can really long and it doesn't get woody right away like some other okra varieties do. I'll try to start the weekly thread on time in the morning because the three year old usually sleeps in late and that should give me some computer time. I hope you all get whatever wonderful weather is in your forecast....rain, cooler temperatures....all of the above. Dawn...See Moreokoutdrsman
6 years agoluvncannin
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agoluvncannin
6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agoShaer
6 years agojlhart76
6 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agojlhart76
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agohazelinok
6 years agoRebecca (7a)
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agoluvncannin
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agojlhart76
6 years agoluvncannin
6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agojacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
6 years agoluvncannin
6 years agojlhart76
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agojlhart76
6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agojacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agoenstanfield
6 years agoRebecca (7a)
6 years agohazelinok
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoluvncannin
6 years agojlhart76
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agojacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years ago
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