These pics were taking in early morning light. By midday, this area is mostly shaded by the shade-cloth. By afternoon, the trees and shrubs on the West side shade the whole area.

The hens are scratching for insects and making a wreck of everything. They gotta eat, so I just push the dirt back around the plants, water it, and add more rocks where they were scratching. Sooner or later, I will run out of rocks!

Holy sh*t!

GGG sent me some White 4 O'clock seeds from her garden to start in mine. I will seed some in there now and save the rest for this fall, if and when we start getting some rain or snow. They will be perfect for the White Garden - their fragrance will perfume the garden every evening and their white blooms will light it up like little stars.
Thank you GGG.

I don't know how you even go out and work at all. It's only 83 here, and I can only be outside for an hour or less. Your white garden still looks ok despite everything.

I want to mulch again, but think it's best to wait until we have a good soaking rain so the mulch holds the moisture in better.

sweetannie,I feel your pain. It isn't that bad here,in Iowa. Right here,we could really use a rain because the soaker they got nearby a couple weeks ago,missed us.It is very,very hot & humid,making it impossible to work in the yard. That was a good idea to put up shade.
Cattle are suffering & dying in the heat. There have been a lot of makeshift shades put up,but they still suffer. And the insects are bothering the animals.
Insects & weeds are worse this year.
I should let my chickens out to scratch. Maybe they would eat some of these darn Jap beetles. They ate up my roses.
Holy sh*t is right!
Doris

I just called Time & Temp - at 2:48 p.m., the temp is 108 with a heat index of 117! We won't reach our temp peak until around 5 today.

I am trying to save my big Beefsteak tomatoes, two zucchini plants and four Big Bertha Bell peppers. All the rest are gone now. Burnt to a crisp, in spite of all I did. I just put a white sheet over the tomatoes and am running the sprinkler on low under them. It is heavily mulched with straw. There is a big Elm tree on the west side, so that cuts the afternoon direct sunlight after 3:30. The drip-lines I set in the garden didn't work. They didn't put out enough water fast enough or wide enough for the plants to get a good drink. The sprinkler on low is working very well.
We shall see...
Doris, I don't know that chickens will eat J. beetles. I didn't see them eating any back in June. Chickens like June bugs and grub worms though. They like snails a lot! I toss them a snail and they go bonkers. They are keeping down the grasshoppers though, bless their feathered heads. It is so hot right now that the JB left the country by the end of June! I know Guineas like beetles of all kinds. Any kind of insect with a hard shell, including wasps and spiders. They love them! I miss my guineas.

I really don't know how much longer I can take this. I am so exhausted. I'm not worrying about my plants making flowers - just trying to keep my plants, shrubs and trees alive! All around me, the land is scorched. It is a cinnamon-brown color and the grasses are that winter wheat color. I am starting to look like that too. :)

As I posted on FB - if I still lived in the desert, 113 wouldn't seem out of the norm in late summer, but this isn't a desert (not yet anyway). The trees and plants and animals here are not acclimated to this. Everything is suffering so. Trees dying all over the state. And you know the wildlife are too. My little oasis is attracting all kinds of wildlife. Mostly they come here for cool water to drink. I am happy to oblige.

Best wishes to all of you in the middle of America right now who are smack dab in the middle of the Heat Dome and drought areas.

I hope my shades help keep what I have left alive. I hope this ends soon for everyone.

~Annie

113. Good grief! I can understand gardening losing its thrill in that weather, especially when the plants involved aren't used to that weather. It's one thing to plant hardy tropicals knowing they'll be blistered in the sun, but your weather this year is out of this world. We moved to NH from Georgia, and two weeks ago we had Georgia weather.--hot in the day, but it didn't cool down at night. NH has occasional hot spells, but it always cools down noticeably when the sun gets low, even before sunset. A couple of weeks ago I felt like I was in the Georgia pressure cooker because the temps stayed hot well into the night.

sweetannie4you, our hearts go out to you! I hope you and your plants hang on. And your chickens, too. Mine have done some bad things in the garden, but overall it's less than I thought. They must be finding bugs in the woods. Keep those rocks coming! Let them takes those dust baths elsewhere!

715rose, that's distressing to hear that animals are dying. It's not a nice thing for the animal, but I feel most for the people who are losing their livelihood in an already bad time. We have gotten our heat break, and I sure hope yours comes soon.

deanna,
the bugs here have all moved into my yard where there is moisture and food! :)
My hens aren't doing any major damage to the plants, but they dig around them and dig away much of the soil and mulch searching for insects or worms. They make messes mostly. So I scoop it back around the plants and add rocks...lots of rocks...big rocks. They can't scratch big rocks. The rocks also hold moisture, so it isn't so bad. Just irritating on top of an already stressful situation.
Normal summers here are high 80s and 90s, with the occasional 100+ degree day(s) in July and early August. We would have ample rain from spring through early July, then it would halt and get dry and hot in July, with the occasional thunderstorm. (Ahhhh). When August arrived, it would start to cool down, slowly, and then the August rains would begin. But for the past 15+ years, those rainy days have been getting fewer and farther between each year. Dry winters too. The last normal Oklahoma weather ended in the mid-late 80s. We had a couple of years of horrible spring and fall flooding and then this weather pattern began. We changed from zone 6a to zone 7b just since living out here, but a dry 7b. We went from a Mesic climate to a sub-Xeric climate during that 20 year time period, and now closer to a Xeric climate since 1996. That is too fast for things to acclimate! It is rather like the Serengeti plains of Africa now or worse!

I know that as much as global warming is in vogue, the 70's were a cool decade, cooler than normal. I remember as a kid seeing a news magazine with a cover about a new ice age coming. it really stressed me out! I began to think about life covered in ice, etc. I know we've all heated up since the 70's a bit. Just found out the new temperature norms have moved me from the 5/4 border into a healthy 5 zone. The norms are decided by the last three decades,, and only calculated in years ending in zero, so this year they were calculated without the1970's for the period 1981-2010 and everybody got warmer. It would be really interesting to see what Oklahoma weather was like 60 years ago. I just hate that kind of heat. It's why we moved from Georgia to NH!

I know the warm and dry weather over the last 20 years is causing a big problem with water shortages in Georgia. When we left Georgia in 2007 we left a lake in the northern mountains that in many coves had completely disappeared due to a terrible drought that year. Really bad! Heavy rains a couple of years ago brought everything back to normal, thankfully. How are your wells and aquifers holding up?

In the 70s, I was one of those young "Naturalists" "Environmentalists" who worked on the initiatives to try to get the government, business, and the public aware that we cannot continue to trash the earth. That it would lead to Global Warming. Because it was a rainy, cooler time period, some people laughed it off. The prediction was for the far future - the polar caps wold melt, the glaciers disappear and the earth's temperatures would rise without the ice to reflect off the radiatio of the sun. The salinity of the oceans would be diluted by the melted ice, which in turn would start to cause horrific storms, massive flooding in certain regions with severe droughts in other areas. The ocean's currents would shut down due to the dilution of the salt. The Gulf Stream affects all the Northern Hemisphere. It is what warms Great Britain and Europe and the northern Hemisphere. It is the rising and falling of the high salinity-to-fresh water-temps which creates these currents. Not enough salt would cause this to fail. No movement would bring on a more rapid occurence of an Ice Age than normal. This naturally happens in cycles, anyway, but it was begining to happen at an alarming rate, much, much faster than normal. Scientists had been studying this at that time since the 1950s, but during the 60s and 70s, they saw that it was really speeding up. CO2 and Methane gasses were also increasing in the upper atmosphere due to the industrialization of mankind. (this is just a brief, but you can see where I am taking it).
Thus, warnings were given that unless man found solutions, it was going to increase more and more rapidly with each decade. There was no window at that time for knowing when it could happen, only that it most definitely would.
At the same time, plants, animals and organisms were disappearing at an alarming rate. New algaes were forming in the oceans and seas that were destroying ecosystems. I remember the great Lakes dying, choked with pollutants and solvents and all manner of garbage and sewage. Disgusting. There was only six inches of water on top of the yuck in may areas. Fish were dying. Groups like ours were instrumental in reversing most of this, but not all. Tons and tons of garbage and raw sewage and chemicals from factories and refineries still continue to pour into the rivers in America. The rivers flow into the Mississippi river and all that flows to New Orleans and out into the Gulf. We took water samples in the lower Miss. Valley and at New Orleans which showed high toxicity - toxic water. This was correlated with the stats showing there was (is?) alarmingly high rates of cancers, heart diseases, miscarriages and birth defects in the lower Mississippi Valley.
Since the 70s, the rate of increase in polar ice melting, thawing tundra, melting glaciers, and the thawing of the Perma Frost regions in Canada alone, has increased at an alarming rate - even much faster than we predicted in the 70s!

I don't see this as an "en vogue" thing, but if public awareness gets people to try to end our self-destruction, I am glad for the help! Knowledge and Awareness - those are good things.

So, "Global Warming" is only one aspect of the whole problem. We just can't keep poisoning and raping our planet for corporate greed and common indifference! We are like the proverbial frog in the pot of water. The boil is on and we sit idly bye unawares of the dangers, insisting that the rising temperature in the pot is just a cycle and it too shall pass. Sadly, the frog dies in the boiling pot. By the time he figured it out, it was too late. The "tipping point" may have come and gone for us now. Not enough has been done to stop it. In fact, we have been deceived and artificially soothed into believing there is any effort to reverse the affects. It's all window dressing. Now we'll just have to wait and see and live it...or die from it.

Hope this helps explain, albeit in brevity, what the situation is and has been since the 70s. It isn't a fad to be part of the in-crowd, it's an attempt to bring awareness and changes for sustaining all life on Earth.

Off my soap box now.

Annie, I am totally with you. We haven't had any rain in Joplin since the week following the tornado May 22, and record heat going on 30 days of 100+ temps. We've lost a lot of plants in spite of daily watering, trees are suffering and we won't know the damage there until next spring.

Even more discouraging, there has been rain all around us and we haven't had a drop. Nada. So dismaying to see dark clouds lightning and hear thunder and know that the rain has bypassed us once again.

But I have hopes. At least we're supposed to see a cool down for a week and the water won't get baked out of the soil faster than it goes in. We have a lot of drip and soaker lines for the root zones and lots of mulch but it isn't enough.

With the extremes we've been having this year, I wouldn't be surprised to see it start raining and not get stopped for a month or so until we're thoroughly sick of that too!

Sandy

Everybody deserves some time on the soapbox. I have my own soapboxes and I will mount them at any time for any reason. I think I do best when I have at least a biweekly chance to mount my soapbox. There is too much going on in our complex life and too few aware, and even fewer that have the hours and hours required to learn about exactly how much in our lives we and others are screwing up daily with disastrous consequences to follow. Nothing like immediate consequences to wake us up, but consequences down the road seem to always be ignored.

Global warming isn't my soapbox, but I'll bemoan hot weather any day. Mosswitch, so sorry to hear that Joplin is having more things to make the summer memorable in a bad way. How is rebuilding and recovery going?

We had our extreme summer two years ago. If was freezing cold through the first week of July, and I mean hot chocolate at swim lessons and wool sweaters kind of freezing. Then the last half of summer was hot and dry. Total extremes. This year is hot, but the heat is broken by some rain and cool spells, thankfully.

Stock up on deodorant and keep the water flowing!

Oh no, your poor plants I know you are major stressed and exhausted. I hope you get some real good rains and very soon.

Deanna, recovery is progressing. FEMA cleanup is nearing an end, but there is still a lot of business and private debris removal yet to do. Rebuilding is beginning to happen with some businesses (Wlamart, HD, Walgreens) but a long long ways to go yet. Lots of places have relocated, and a lot of people have moved out of the city and boought homes elsewhere. There is going to be a lot of vacant area that the city will have to decide what to do with, but there is a chance to rebuild in a better way if that can be accomplished. The hospital is going to rebuild in a new location, the highschool will be held in a vacant building in the mall (I know!) and the other destroyed schools have made arrangements so that school will start on time. FEMA trailers have been brought in north of the city so people will at least have temporary housing (looks like army barracks, but at least it's a roof over their heads) for the next year and a half.

It may take a couple of years to recover and rebuild, but we have an opportunity to make a real difference. Should be an interesting ride!

Sandy

(((Hugs Annie))) I so admire you for speaking out about this, even if only a few take it to heart at least it's a start. We all can and should if only in a small way help slow down this slippery slope we're on. So hoping you get some cooler temps and rain soon. I'll take our lousy winter and horrible spring any day over what you and others are experiencing, there's no comparison.

Annette

Sandy wrote:

"Even more discouraging, there has been rain all around us and we haven't had a drop. Nada. So dismaying to see dark clouds lightning and hear thunder and know that the rain has bypassed us once again. "

That is exactly what has been happening here!
Although our tornado destruction wasn't as massive and widespread as yours, it was nonetheless just as severe. Clean up is still going on here with much the same situation. If our tornado hadn't jagged just the little bit that it did, and at just the moment it did, it would have gone through major city areas in that area too, with much the same result I am certain. My heart and thoughts are with you and the good people of Joplin.

A storm came through yesterday evening. We got wind gusts up to 80 MPH and a spot of rain. West and north of here, they got a ton of rain. Like for you guys, the Heat Dome will shuffle off to the West (poor them), and for the next week we are supposed to have cooler days and maybe even more rain. Yippee!
I can dig it!
Today, it was a good ten degrees cooler than it has been. I didn't even go out and water today. I needed the rest. If it stays like this, I might even get some tomatoes! Two of my daylilies have new blooms since I set up the Shade-cloth and now with this reprieve from the triple digit heat, maybe there will be more flowers, too.

Annette: ((HUGS to You)) - I love you sweet sister-friend. You have been such a dear friend in so many ways these past years. I hope some day to meet you in person - maybe when this country goes into complete and utter chaos, and we are forced to flee up there. ;)
I hope you know that if there is ever a major earthquake or one of those mega-volcanoes up your way, you can come down here to miserable old Oklahoma and be "safe" with me...until the next Missouri Earthquake hits and this entire region goes to ruin. (lol) The center is at St. Louis. The last time it occurred, was in the early 1830s and there were few people and no cities there. Good grief! I guess we just can't win for losing! (:0
One thing is for certain: We are all in this toilet bowel of life together, one way or another. Might as well laugh. We can't seem to change a thing! Mother Nature has the upper hand. We are just going along for the ride.
~Annie

~Annie

A couple of years to recover and rebuild...wow. I grew up in Alabama where tornados are a normal part of spring, but I never heard of any tornado like the ones that hit Joplin and Alabama this year. It's hard to imagine it. The rest of us tend to forget these things once the news stories end. I have a friend in New Orleans, and it was interesting to talk to her about what parts of life went back to normal and what didn't. Not what I would have expected.

So, if high school is in a mall, does that mean girls can go shopping between classes? Just kidding! I look forward to hearing how that real difference happens in time.