Dottie - I don't think Vinca is a bad choice. I've seen it used plenty of times in difficult areas. I think in some situations it's the only thing that will work. For me though I would save it for the hardest of all places to garden - under large trees in dry shade and bad soil. In raised beds or planters it quickly takes over and dominates everything. But you can't beat it for low maintenance. My favorites are the variegated forms of Vinca major. It's easy to pick out plants but the key to success will always be how well the soil is conditioned and how much work the gardener is willing to put in. The plants aren't really on the top of the list - everything depends on the health of the soil. This is why I tell people that during extreme periods of drought the thing to do is work on your hardscaping and build up your soil. It isn't the most glamorous part of gardening but it is the key to a great garden. My yard is so hot and dry that even the weeds are dying!

Best drought tolerant plants for me: Sedum (several in my garden) Hens-n-Chicks Knautia Echinacea angustifolia (much more so than E. purpurea) Lavender Thyme Salvia Coreopsis laciniata and Coreopsis tinctoria (annual) Ratibida columnifera Rudbeckia hirta (can be annual, biennial or perennial from same seed source!) Gaillardia Blue Flax (Linum lewisii perenne) Daylily Bearded Iris Sweet Alyssum Perennial Alyssum (Aurinia saxatilis 'Gold Dust') African Daisy (Venidium....annual) Dianthus (not sure the species....a perennial to about 8-10" with dark pink/fushia blooms) Feverfew 'Flora Alba' Saponaria 'Flore Pleno' Cosmic Orange Cosmo Yarrow Inula ensifolia (had it but killed it during tranplant) Grasses: Little Bluestem, Big Bluestem, Blue Fescue, Oatgrass, Feather Reed Grass That's all I can think of at 5am LOL! Annual precip. here is an average 17". Hardly any of that is in summer! I water maybe once every 2 weeks not because the list above wouldn't make it otherwise, but because I also have other plants planted among the rest: Joe Pye Weed, Marigold, Monarda, ect., but I try to just water at the base of just those plants, however lately I've been lazy and just water everyone :D I summer mulch with grass clippings and straw moistly in veg areas (they get watered 1x week) and other beds are densely planted enough that the soil is hidden. My other beds are quick draining gravely/sandy loam.

The best survivor on our property was Gomphrena (Globe amaranth) "Strawberry Fields". We have received slightly over 14" of rain in 2011 and it has received no irrigation because it is 300' from the house. The gomphrena bloomed all summer long, finally dying out last week. Other really tough plants that did well all year but received some irrigation are these: four o'clocks, portulaca, Texas hummingbird sage, autumn sage, 'Laura Bush' petunia, datura, verbena bonariensis, malva sylvestris 'Zebrina' and 'Mystic Merlin', morning glories, Texas Red Star Hibiscus and Swamp Mallow (but only because the Mallow received steady irrigation). The trumpet creeper vines that received some water near the house bloomed all summer long, but the trumpet creeper and American Cross Vine that were too far from the house to irrigate hung on and survived but haven't bloomed very well. The coral honeysuckle 'Pink Lemonade' looked good until about mid-August but has gone downhill since then. I'm not sure it will survive if rain doesn't fall soon. All the pasture grasses dried and either went dormant or died. The Johnson grass, which is a horrible weed just about as annoying as bermuda grass, lasted longest and I doubt any of it is actually dead though it definitely is dormant. The bermuda grass around the house didn't die, but didn't look good even though it received some irrigation. With a lot of the trees in the woodland that have dropped their leaves and gone dormant early, we won't know until next year if they've survived. I think most of the large trees will be fine if it rains some this fall and winter, but a lot of the smaller understory trees may not make it. The hoped-for autumn rains haven't really materialized here although there's been some patchy, scattered showers here and there, so everything is in pretty bad shape. Normally we'll get 3.5 to 4" of rain in September and we've had only 0.7" this month, so everything still looks dry and pitiful and we continue to have grass fires, brush fires and wild fires. Most of our native grasses and plants in the pastures scorched, dried out and went dormant or died this summer. They received no irrigation. The toughest survivors (some of them actually greened up and began blooming after they received 1.2" of rainfall in August) included greenthread daisy, lazy daisy, liatris, goldenrod, native sunflowers and frogfruit. The frogfruit plants in the front pasture lasted all summer, until temps in the 112-115 range finally got to them in early to mid-August, but the frogfruit plants that received a slight amount of moisture in a location close to the wildlife feeding area stayed in bloom until early September. They're still green but aren't blooming. The toughest shrubs were the Burford hollies, native Possumhaw hollies, sumac and southern wax myrtles but they all received some irrigation. The trees that tolerated the drought with the least damage were the native Red Oaks, post oaks, burr oaks, pecan trees (they, along with the native persimmons, did better than anything else), desert willow and chaste tree. The native roughleaf dogwood did fine in partial shade, and not so well in full sun. Older, larger and more well-established trees showed drought stress but little damage. Younger trees stressed much earlier and some have dropped leaves and gone into dormancy early as a drought survival mechanism. Lambsquarters did great even where not irrigated as did, unforunately, the pigweed. Basil, rosemary, catnip and mint held on longer than any of the other herbs, but ultimately the heat and drought killed them. Well, with mint you never really know---we'll see if it comes back next year. In the veggie garden, the tomatoes that produced best were those planted earliest. The plants put in containers in February and carried into the garage at night produced ripe fruit beginning in late April and continuing through late June or early July. The tomato plants put into the ground in earliest April produced very well before the heat got to them in late June or early July. Any tomato plants that went into the ground later than early April didn't set and ripen much fruit before the temps got too hot for fruit set in late May. The container tomatoes that produced well were Big Boy, Better Boy, Husky Red Cherry and Big Beefsteak. The best producers from the early April plantings were Early Goliath, Cluster Goliath, Goliath, JD's Special C-Tex, Gary 'O Sena, SunGold, Ildi, Jaune Flammee', Russian Persimmon, Mountain Magic, Black Cherry and Matt's Wild Cherry. Even though I haven't watered the garden since late July, one SunGold plant has held on stubbornly and survived and is still producing fruit, albeit they are smaller than usual. Their flavor is great too. I've never been impressed with any of the heat-set type tomatoes. They are bred to set fruit in slightly higher temperatures, but their flavor always has been poor in my garden. The best heat-set type I ever grew was Merced, but it was taken off the market a few years ago. Other veggies that produced well in the heat were onions, potatoes and lettuce in the cool-season crop category, and okra, sweet corn, green beans, southern peas, cukes, watermelons, muskmelons and peppers in the warm-season category. Nothing but the okra produced much after I stopped irrigating in July but I had planted everything pretty early so got good early crops. I planted a lot of interesting tomato varieties from Brad Gates' Wild Boar Farms but they went into the ground later than the varieties listed above so didn't get a chance to set many fruit before the heat got to them. I'll try them again next year. I still have lima beans growing in a cattle trough near the barn and they are blooming and setting beans. They have received regular irrigation, and when they are through producing I will replace them with lettuce and other salad greens for winter. Hopefully the arrival of the cold front late yesterday marked the end of summer weather for us down here. Now, if only rain will fall....but none is in our 7-day forecast. We have had some cooler, milder weather in September, but hit 107 earlier this month and it was 102 degrees yesterday before the cold front finally made it this far south. I'm going to overseed the lawn with rye grass today and overseed one pasture with a deer forage mix in the hopes that I can irrigate both of them enough to get the seed to germinate and the plants to grow. We still have a lot of snake activity, with the ones I'm seeing the most lately being the Timber Rattlers and the non-venomous rough green snakes and the racers. So, with the Rattlers out and prowling around, I haven't started any garden cleanup yet. Obviously, with the extreme heat, drought and wildfires, I didn't plant a fall garden at all. I'm ready for October and ready for 2012---assuming rain falls in decent amounts in 2012. The local stores have pansies, ornamental kale, and snapdragons out in the garden centers but it is still too hot to plant them here. I always look at them and then sigh and walk away. Even if I planted any of them, the deer would get them....and I can't blame the deer because they're really hungry. I'll probably plant some amaryllis and paper white bulbs in pots indoors around early November just so I'll have something growing.

Hi Dave, spring was quite wet for majority of WI. My point was that county data and definitely state data is not indicative to what one might get in their yard so its tough from a gardening perspective to see who has dry conditions for these types of summaries or even the drought monitor. Some areas of WI where getting 6" of rain at a crack so it was boosting totals significantly. For example some areas of southern WI got 10" of rain (flooding) in July whereas I was at 2.8". I'll take that any July eitherway. This isn't quite where I'm at but as you can see we're just shy of 19" precip (I'm even less) through August. A far cry from any record precipitation. We likely won't hit our average annual precip of 35" by end of year. So in my mind its actually a abnormally dry year for my direct area. For perspective I took zip code 48105 in MI and it shows 21.4" of precip but the drought monitor says its abnormally dry. Its all relative!