March 2019, Week 1, Winter Weather Dragging On in Oklahoma
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
5 years ago
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dbarron
5 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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January 2019, Week 1
Comments (65)dbarron, I'm glad I was able to find that thread, and I'm glad you posted something on it in order to resurrect it from the archives. It will be interesting to see how the okra does for you. I consider my whole garden one long running experiment. To me, there is nothing more fun than trying new varieties, or new growing techniques or new....whatever. I get bored with doing the same things in the same way year in and year out. Jennifer, That is too bad about the power outages. I bet the house did get cold. We have a generator now, so the thought of a power outage doesn't bother me as much as it once did. Still, it is a lot of work to wheel the big old heavy generator out of the garage (it always is behind a ton of Tim's junk) and set it up, so I'd just as soon not need to use it. Our Wal-Mart has partial stuff on the garden center shelves, but nothing I want---mostly chemical pesticides and herbicides. You know, because we need all those in January? (Not that I use them any other time of the year either.) It was real hit-and-miss. There were some organic products outdoors on the garden center shelves, some patio furniture and outdoor throw pillows (because people buy those in January?) If I ran a garden center, I'd have seeds and seed-starting supplies on the shelves first, not pesticides and herbicides. There's still a ton of unsold Christmas merchandise, but quite a bit less than a few days ago. Even at 75% off, most people walk right by and don't even look at it. Everybody's clearly over Christmas and moving on. Nancy, I hope you hit that button and ordered your seeds. I did quite a bit of that yesterday, but I really did try to show 'some' restraint. Maybe not enough restraint, but I tried. Then, this morning I went to the websites of Hazzard's Seeds and Eden Brothers and both boggled my mind, as always, with the huge selection and huge quantities available in bulk. I didn't order anything, but I am pondering doing so. It is 69 degrees, gorgeous, clear and sunny with blue skies galore here. I just love it! Cats and dogs are happy although the ground still is terribly waterlogged and covered with big puddles. I am excited we will have more days like this over the next few days. Both the 6-10 day and 8-14 day outlooks give us an above average chance of rain. No, no, no. This is supposed to be our driest month historically. Can the rain please stay away for at least a couple of weeks? Why doesn't this rain fall in July and August when we need it? dbarron, Trowels? Ha ha ha ha ha. I'll admit to having at least 6 or 7. I swear ....somebody here (and it must be me because I am the only gardener here) leaves them lying in a bed in the summer and then they get lost beneath plants or mulch. By the end of the season, I'm down to 1 or 2 trowels being visible and usable. Then, in the winter or early spring I find them all again, gather them up, clean them off and put them in the garden shell. It is the same thing every year. At least I finally have more trowels than I can manage to lose in one growing season so I no longer actually run out of trowels and have to go buy another one. For years, it seemed like I had to buy one more per year. In fact, I have to resist the urge to buy another one "just in case" when they hit the store shelves. Amy, Believe it or not, my seed hoarding has improved a lot and I am getting better about using them up before they lose their viability. Well, I still hoard too many tomato seeds, but you never know when you'll want to add another 10 or 20 varieties to the Grow List. This year, I put the seeds I want in the shopping cart online. Then I go back and delete at least half of them before I order. So far that is working out pretty well. My storage tote seed crate is emptier than it has been in at least 10 years. Lisa, Wow! You sure have taken on a lot of responsibility with MOW. I am so proud of you---that is such an awesome thing that y'all do for your community and I know that y'all are making them really yummy food. They are so lucky to have people like you who care about them. You might not be behind....it might be that we are getting ahead of ourselves just a little bit, but what else can a bunch of gardeners do in the winter time? Talking, planning and dreaming about gardening isn't really the same as being able to do it, but it does help pass the time until gardening time rolls around again. This afternoon a yellow jacket tried to come into the house with Tim. It made it into the mudroom and there it died. It now resides in the trash can. Will somebody please tell the yellow jackets that it is winter time and we don't need their company in January? We feed the deer every day, of course, and this morning or perhaps overnight, one of them left me a small present at the deer feeding area---one small antler probably from a 6-pt buck, since this antler had 3 points. I picked it up and brought it indoors and will let it dry for a while. The grandkids will love seeing it...they are at the age where seeing and collecting anything natural like bird feathers, pretty rocks, dandelions, etc. just thrills them. Dawn...See MoreMarch 2019, Week 3, Spring Arrives For Real
Comments (61)Megan, I am so concerned about everyone in Nebraska---of course, I think the farmers and ranchers are getting the worst of it, but then there's all the local businesses whose livelihood depend on the farmers and ranchers too. It is so heartbreaking and so devastating and really, simply stunning, when you read the first-hand reports and see the videos and photos. My mind is boggled. How in the world does anyone recover from such utter devastation on so many fronts---not just the loss of their financial livelihood, livestock lines they've been breeding forever, buildings, equipment, land that may be silted, badly eroded and ruined for some time in terms of being able to use it properly and start working on recovery, etc., but then the loss of homes, personal belongings, family heirlooms, paperwork, etc. Then there are the communities that will be crippled with overwhelming financial needs---roads, water treatment plants, and other infrastructure that need to be rebuilt, etc. My heart goes out to all the people there, and I think Nebraskans overall are such good, strong, salt-of-the-earth folks who are used to taking care of themselves and their neighbors, and I worry about the mental and psychological toll all of this will take on folks like that who aren't used to asking any form of government for help. They are going to need all the help they can get. There is the larger worry about other states too. Water flows downstream, and all those crazy-heavy winter snows are going to melt, and then the ground will thaw in the cold states, releasing even more water that currently is trapped as in-ground ice, etc. The flood outlook for much of the country looks really bleak for the next few months. My mind goes back to 1993 and the massive flooding that year, and I wonder if this year's flooding could come close to that. At the present time, only mild flooding is expected to touch Oklahoma so I don't think most of us have to worry about flooding, but we still do have heavily saturated soils already and our rainy season really hasn't begun yet. It really doesn't take flooding to create garden struggles---just heavily saturated soil alone will do that. I read an outstanding blog post about the spring flood outlook on WU yesterday, and it was very sobering to read it and to think about all the lives potentially to be affected by the coming Spring 2019 floods. I hope you have a productive weekend and can get gardening things done. After a productive last couple of days, I feel much better about the spring garden overall, even though my soil moisture still is horrifically high, even in my raised beds. I am trying to file away all those concerns about soil moisture in the category of "that which I cannot change" because even well-amended, raised beds that function just fine 90% of the time still are going to be wet after months of being 100% saturated plus. At least there are no puddles standing in my raised beds. Jennifer, I will start by saying that I do not believe four o'clocks form long running roots like that--they form huge potato-like tubers that can get to be the size of a human head in just a few short years, but....having said that, those little plants, including the one you're holding in your hand, look quite a bit like emerging four o'clocks....not seed-grown four o'clocks, whose cotyledons are quite distinct and not visible in your photos, but returning four o'clocks. So, I guess the question is whether or not you have any four o'clocks to compare these little plants to, and if not, what else do you have growing that has similar foliage. I think they are a weed because those little heart-shaped leaves look so familiar, but I don't know the name of them. What I remember about them is that I removed little ones like that from our garden by the hundreds for several years in our first decade here until they finally all were gone. The thing about those little greenhouses is (a) they don't keep plants warmer outdoors at night unless you run a heater at night because the plastic has virtually no heat retention value and they are too small to have enough mass inside to hold heat....so on freezing nights, without a heater, plants will freeze; a person might be able to mitigate that a small bit by placing them on a concrete or stone foundation like a patio or a corner of their driveway though. (b) Strong wind will bend them, break them or carry them away---I have seen this happen to people over and over again who loved their little portable greenhouse until the first strong wind it faced destroyed it. Sadly we have no lack of strong wind here in OK in some months. (c) The smaller a greenhouse, the harder it is to properly regulate the temperatures inside, so keeping the plants warm enough at night and cool enough during the day is a real challenge. Even small hard-plastic 4' x 6' greenhouses are hard to regulate (I had a neighbor with one and an uncle with one) temperature-wise. I know folks who have gone off to work happily, leaving their plants in their little portable soft-plastic greenhouses like this, only to come home on a hot Spring day and find the plants pretty much roasted, toasted and dead or dying because they forget to unzip the door to release heat or they chose not to unzip the door because the morning air was so cold when they left for work. A person who is home all day and who can unzip the door and open it to vent out heat might have more success with them, but there's still the issue of them not holding in heat at night. I always like them when I see them and picture plants inside sheltered from the wind and then toy with the idea of buying one just for hardening off plants right inside the garden, but I don't buy one because I know how hard it is to regulate temperatures inside my much-larger hoophouse style greenhouse, and it has 4 operable vents for air flow and cooling and two walk-in doors that can be opened to facilitate air flow and cooling too, and I have a large evaporative cooler I can roll into it and use as well, and I've been gardening long enough to know the smaller the greenhouse, the harder such temperature and air flow regulation is. The best use for these little things is either inside a garage or barn to protect seedlings from cats, mice and such, or inside a house if cats are a problem, or maybe inside a larger greenhouse or hoophouse for plants that need extra cold protection or perhaps if you need to do serious plant propagation you could do it inside one of these because you could hold in the humidity better in such a small confined space---sort of like a propagation chamber. Be grateful you don't have standing water...it breeds mosquitoes and ground that has been saturated for months develops a sour smell that smells worse than a swamp. I am sure that all the grasses and wildflowers are dead in the areas where water has been standing almost nonstop since September. I always hope for rain to miss us here during March and April when it is time to plant because wet, soggy clay is hard on seeds, often rotting them before they can sprout. I can water if we are too dry, but I don't have any way to extract excess moisture from the soil. When I was planting brassicas this week, I hit standing water about 2" lower than the depth at which I was transplanting seedlings, and that is in a raised bed, albeit a raised bed at the lower, more soggy end of the garden. Sadly, that well-amended clay seems to wick moisture upward from the wetter ground beneath the raised beds. So, my brassicas may not make it and if they don't, they don't, and I'll just move on to the next thing. I am worried about what Spring rainfall will do to an already soggy garden but rainfall is one of those things over which we have no control. The sad thing is that we could use this moisture in June, July and August, but those are the months when rain can become quite rare to almost nonexistent. Jen, I am watching our forecast and thinking that the cold nights are almost done with us, so maybe you can squeak through this Spring without having to do too much more plant protection. Our soil temperatures, at least in the raised beds, are coming up pretty rapidly too. We just need for the nights to stop dipping into the 30s because that is keeping the soil from holding its nice daytime temperatures, which are in the 60s. I probably could plant tomato plants in the ground today, and certainly could plant them in containers, and feel like the soil mostly is warm up for them, but our average soil temperatures keep lagging behind our daytime soil temps because the nights are still slightly cool on some nights. We also haven't had much really strong wind....say, gusts in the 30s or higher, since the bomb cyclone moved on, so I'm hoping that March, which did come roaring in like a lion here, is now sedating departing like a lamb. This has been a pleasant change as the tomato plants are out all day long now and get enough wind to toughen them up but not so much wind that they are damaged. It is supposed to rain on and off here all day, so there's probably no hope to get in any gardening at all. At least everything that I transplanted into the ground earlier this week should get some nice light rain, and hopefully no big downpours or I'm going to have to build raised beds on top of my raised beds, which would be ridiculous. Almost "everybody" is back now....Purple Martins, hummingbirds, monarchs, etc. to add to a plethora of bees, bumble bees, wasps, yellow jackets, all kinds of moths and butterflies, craneflies, etc. This week Spring absolutely exploded into being here, not only in name, but in the reality of the flora and fauna, and it is so good to finally feel like I can start spending at least a part of every day in the garden. As long as the grandkids are still living here, it likely won't be all day every day because the 4 year old gets bored after about 4 hours of gardening time, but Chris and Jana are working on the last big project---that 14' long closet that is almost big enough to be a room and, once they finish that, they can move into their home. I'm going to miss them, and I haven't minded adapting my garden time so I can spend more time with the girls---it truly has been a gift to be able to spend so much time with all 4 of the---the big kids and the little kids---over the last month and the house undoubtedly will seem too quiet, too empty and sort of lonely once they are gone. Dawn...See MoreApril 2019, Week 1, The Warm-Up Is Coming
Comments (44)Larry, I don't know what that is. Do you suppose it could be some sort of Asian green similar to Bok Choy? That white base is what reminds me of Bok Choy, but I don't grow it, so don't know what it looks like at a young stage. Jennifer, I agree that the more property you have, the harder it is. At least the deer and voles have made it easy for me...they eat everything I plant that is not fenced off to exclude them, so I quit trying to have nice landscaping around the house, other than trees and a few shrubs and a couple of vines, because it all just becomes Deer Chow. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as it forces me to concentrate my efforts only within the fenced garden spots. I hope y'all got the photos done today. The weather here was bad in the morning, but not so bad by mid-afternoon. The sun even came out eventually, but now we're back to mud and standing puddles. The dogs came in from their dog yard, and I don't know what they did, but they all had wet, gooey mud about the consistency of chocolate pudding caked all over their feet up to their ankles. I spent a long time cleaning up after them since they left splotches of very wet mud with every step that they took. I'd rather have spent today in the garden, but it just wasn't a garden day today and tomorrow won't be either. Rebecca, I guess everyone was beyond ready for the Cherry Street market to be open and to have all those wonderful things available there. They sure did sell out early. I haven't seen anything 'yet' in the forecast that indicates your area will experience freezing temperatures, but I only look at the NWS forecast and it only goes out 7 days. Our coldest night so far looks like it will be Thursday night, and it really won't be that bad either (46 degrees on Thurs and 49 on Fri), but you're a lot further north, so seeing forecast lows in the upper 30s for your area isn't totally shocking. What worries me about forecast lows is that they often are highly inaccurate a week out. Last week we started out with a forecast low of 39 for our coldest weekend night, and then it dropped daily until it hit 32 I think, and our actual low was 31 or 32 but our Mesonet station was even colder---maybe 29. I think that whole progression of decreasing forecast lows for the 31st of Mar and 1st of Apr was a good reminder to me that just because the forecast looks good 6 or 7 days out, well.....I shouldn't assume it actually will be that good. The rain has been kind to us though....only rain, no hail, and that is about the best one can hope for in April. Areas of Texas well south and east of us got the sort of hail that was in our forecast as a general possibility. At least one area got much worse hail---Grapeland TX had mixed hail that seemed to range from maybe quarter sized to softball sized. I saw not just car windshields and windows either completely knocked out or with huge holes in them, but big fist-sized or larger holes in the bodies of the cars as well. Can y'all imagine what that sort of hail would do to a garden? I heard on the news that some hail-related injuries were reported---mostly due to flying glass. We were supposed to have 3 rounds of rain Friday night/Saturday and instead we only had 1. I'm okay with that. One was enough. Dawn...See MoreApril 2019, Week 2, Spring and Not Winter, Right?
Comments (45)Nancy, I expect it will take a while for the house to feel normal again. We had gotten used to the screeching of the tropical birds, the sounds of a lot more feet going up and down the staircase, etc. Yesterday I came into the living room and automatically turned the TV on to Nickelodeon just out of habit because I'm so used to having it on for the kids to watch the cartoons. It was on for a minute or two before I realized there were no children here and switched it to The Weather Channel to see what was going on weatherwise. lol. We had a lot of rain considering it rarely rained hard but was mostly just a steady light to moderate rain that came in waves as the storm rotated around the low pressure center. We're back to being a colossal mud pit again, but I have high hopes that maybe it will dry up fairly quickly in the drier, warmer weather we're expected to have for the next few days. I believe rain and the chance of severe weather return mid-week. Centaureas in general don't like our clay, especially when it is wet, so I don't grow them much. I think I've grown Sweet Sultan only once, and it was in a very wet and cold Spring and didn't do well here. Mullein does fine but tends to be invasive when happy so, believe it or not, I avoid it because I do not want for every single plant in my garden to be an invasive one, and I have too many of those types already. I have no issues with tropical milkweeds and think it mostly is just a pawn in some sort of power struggle between different factions in the gardening-for-monarchs segment of the gardening world. When I have grown it, the monarchs seem to ignore it for the most part---perhaps because we have fields and fields around us with wall-to-wall (or maybe I should say fence-to-fence) native milkweeds in season. The monarchs always seem to prefer the natives, so those are the ones I try to grow for them. I do love the colors of the tropical milkweeds as they seem to blend nicely with a lot of the hot-colored flowers we have in bloom in our garden in summer, including Pride of Barbados (Caesalpinia pulcherrima), Cape Honeysuckle (Tecoma capensis), Texas lantana (Lantana horrida, a name that always makes me laugh), miscellaneous other forms of lantana, and Yellow Bells (Tecoma stans). Because of our heat, our summer plants tend towards flowers in hot summer colors of yellow, orange, red, coral, etc. I might feel differently about tropical milkweed if I lived in a coastal area where it undoubtedly is overplanted and probably in bloom far too late in the season. I can understand why it probably should be cut back near the end of their migratory period so the monarchs will keep on heading towards their overwintering grounds in Mexico. If disease builds up on it, then obviously that is an issue we don't see as much with the native milkweeds that are not as long-lasting each season. Jennifer, Oh those cages and sheets sound like a mess! I would imagine the trees would have been fine uncovered. Our cats finally have calmed down and stopped nibbling plants so much, but to some extent, it always has been a problem. It is just as they get older, the prefer sleeping in the sunroom to devouring my plants. When they are outdoors it is not such a big deal, maybe because there's a large area to roam and they don't focus overly much on the garden, other than coming in there meowing to find me when they need to be petted or to have their tummy rubbed or whatever. After they get a little loving attention, they run off to play again. It might help that we grow catnip, catmint and catgrass in the garden for them. I don't know. One thing they've never outgrown is nipping the bean sprouts and eating them, so when beans are sprouting I try to keep the cats away from them until they've leafed out a bit more and no longer are so appealing as cat snacks. Our chickens lack the sense to come in out of the rain too. We combat that somewhat by only opening their door to go out into their chicken run instead of letting them free-range. They'll get bored if they aren't free-ranging and often decide to just go back into the coop after a while, thereby staying dry more of the time. Yesterday while we were covering up plants, the winds rose into the 40s and the trees were waving and the wind was sort of roaring and it scared the rooster. He started having a big fit...the sort of loud screaming he'll do when there's a coyote, a hawk or some other perceived danger. We couldn't find any reason for his distress, other than the loud wind, so Tim just herded the chickens into their coop and closed the door leading out to the chicken run so they would feel safe and sound. It was only a couple of hours earlier than they usually would put themselves up, and it probably was good for them to get inside out of the moisture. I think the most frustrating thing yesterday was that we are so used to being outdoors and being busy on the weekends. It was really hard to stay indoors. We rarely have days like that where it literally rains all day, and I'm glad. The weather news is just so dismal this morning. The Franklin TX tornado and the others that hit about 100 miles from Franklin killed several people and the one near Alto tore up the Caddoan Mounds museum there during some sort of festival. Then there were more tornadoes last night and this morning, all of them destructive and some of them deadly. I hate severe thunderstorm and tornado season. It doesn't even take a tornado to do massive damage---large hail stones and strong winds do a lot of damage too. The propensity for severe weather makes April and May less enjoyable, weather-wise, than they otherwise would be. Last night's weather was odd. We were down to 40 degrees by around 9 p.m. with an overnight forecast low of 39. Then, before midnight the temperatures begin rising again and didn't drop again, so the time we spent covering plants was in essence wasted time. Oh well, that probably was it for this year and I'm glad. We just as easily could have gone colder than forecast, so it probably always is better to be safe than sorry. Last night a cardinal was perched on a little ledge up underneath the roof of the back porch when the dogs went outdoors one last time before bedtime. Poor thing. I think it was just trying to stay warm and dry. I imagine all the songbirds would like for the cold to back off a bit too. It just seems so bizarre (yet it happens every Spring) to have highs in the upper 80s or lower 90s and lows in the 30s all in the same week. Maybe the new week's weather will be kinder, but I do see possible severe weather in our forecast for mid-week so maybe it won't be. Dawn...See Morehazelinok
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5 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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dbarron