Carol, welcome to my world, I have to fight this almost every year. I planted onions yesterday, about dark tonight we got a pretty strong rain. I felt I had to plant the onions even though it was too wet. My seed potatoes are in the closet sprouting, my ornamental sweet potatoes are in the bedroom floor sprouting. I still have more onions in the bathroom. It looks like I may be gardening in the house this year, at least I have a little dog to help me keep things watered.

Carol,

This is Oklahoma. That's the only explanation you need, isn't it? : )

Seriously, I feel like the reason our weather is so erratic is because it is right in the middle of the main portion of the continental USA (Sorry, Alaska and Hawaii aren't included in this discussion) and gets influenced by weather patterns and troughs from every side. Sometimes folks in Northern OK have weather being influenced by a front from the northeast, north or northwest at the exact same time folks in SW OK are getting some sort of weather out of the west and down here in southern OK we might be having a strong south wind bringing us humid, moist Gulf air....which flies over our heads and inevitably brings rain to someone else, not us.

I am only slightly kidding when I sometimes make the comment that we do have all four seasons here in Oklahoma, and sometimes we have them all in the same day.

Look at the weather for the state overall for the next few days....thunderstorm and some possibly severe Sat-Sun, then a little mild weather for a couple of days, then turning colder with a chance of snow in some parts of the state. Somewhere in there is one very high fire danger day. That pretty much sums up our February weather-----anything goes.

What I really want to know is why the NWS can perfectly forecast the conditions likely to give us severe thunderstorms or tornadoes (or in New England's case today and tomorrow, a strong nor'easter) but theycannot get anywhere close to being right about our overnight low temperatures. (Or, sometimes our high temperatures as well.) Our forecast was for 41 degrees overnight and Burneyville's was similar, and we went to 32 degrees here with a heavy frost and Burneyville went to 28. This is why, when I look at my forecast at planting time in spring, I always subtract 10 degrees from whatever they say the low will be and I think of my low temp as being in the range of whatever they forecast it will be, give or take 10 degrees. It drives me crazy. I would have given up gardening here in frustration if it weren't for floating row covers. Last night around sunset I went out to the greenhouse and brought my early tomato plants indoors as well as the seedling flat that has all my tomatoes, peppers, ground cherries and cool-season seedlings in it. I just didn't trust that forecast low of 41.

What I have found since moving here is that no matter what they forecast, you have to expect and be prepared for almost any odd thing the weather can throw at us.

Still, nothing ever would have prepared me for that night in May 2008 when we were 77 or 78 degrees during the day, had a forecast low of 50 degrees, and went down to 32 degrees with a heavy frost. Between the killing freeze and heavy frost, I lost 90% of my tomato and pepper plants, and some of those tomato plants already had fruit ranging from golf ball to tennis ball size. That was absolutely the last time I trusted any springtime forecast low because I know just how bad things can be if you believe the forecast and don't cover up your plants when there is a remote chance of a freeze or frost. In case you're reading this and think that Love County's weather is too odd, well.....the very next year George had an almost identical forecast situation where the weather went way colder than forecast and his tomato plants froze. I remember that well because Carol had raised some Baker Family tomato plants and was able to give George some of her plants to use as replacements for his frozen ones. Since 2008, 2012 was the first year where we didn't have a late frost on either May 3rd or May 4th. I hope it is a trend that continues.

Larry, I had that sort of year last year. It rained like mad in February and I had stubbornly mudded in potatoes and onions only to see a lot of them rot when we had two separate 3" rainfalls a few days apart. Luckily I also planted both potatoes and onions in the Peter Rabbit Garden's higher raised beds, and those did just fine. This year, all the potatoes and onions will go into beds raised well above grade level. We don't get much rain here any more it seems, but when we do it seems like it always falls just before planting time so you either have to delay planting or mud stuff in and hope for the best. No matter how much I amend our red clay, and even in raised beds, it holds too much moisture in late winter and early spring, but still doesn't hold moisture well enough in summer.

You know, it isn't the little dry spells that get us, or the little rainy spells. It is the prolonged rainfall like you get, and like I had here for about 6 weeks last winter/spring, or the really long periods with little to no rainfall in summer.

I'm working on a new garden plot in mostly sandy soil. Someday it will be great for winter crops because even after it is amended with organic matter to help it hold moisture, it still will drain much better than my original garden spot. However, while double digging as part of the bed-building and soil-enrichment process I am finding an underground labyrinth of tunnels belonging to some sort of burrowing animal---maybe voles or gophers, so I know I cannot put root crops back there in that new garden plot west of the barn the first year because I'm going to be fighting those varmints enough as it is without enticing them into the garden with big fat root crops for them to chew on.

Y'all can send me any rain or snow you don't want. I have not planted anything in the ground yet because of the cold nights, so at this point moisture would be good and wouldn't interfere in my planting. We had rain in our forecast for Wed and Thurs and all we got was heavy fog that left 1 of 2 one-hundredths of an inch in the rain gauge.

We have a higher chance of rain in the weekend forecast and it probably will fall because Tim and I are planning to spend Saturday through Tuesday getting all the double-dug beds finished. Obviously if it rains very much, we'll have to change our plans and work on something else. In that case, when rain isn't actually falling, we can work on the hay bale garden north of the barn. We already have put down the cardboard in the bed areas and have built the outline of the beds with old hay bales. We are going to fill in the middle area of the hay bale beds hugelkultur style with wood gathered from the woodland and top that off with compost from our compost pile. This area is intended to be the spot where we will grow winter squash so they can ramble and roam all over the place and not bury other plants beneath them like they do in the big garden. However, if the weather were to mysteriously turn really wet, I could add more topsoil or compost to the tops of those hay bale beds and plant potatoes and onions there. I'm going to plant catmint and catnip in those beds to attract the cats so they will hang around and do field mouse and vole control because that always is the issue we have here in our rural location with hay bale or hugelkultur beds....the rodents come and then the snakes come, and then when I see the snakes.....well, to say I get a little jumpy doesn't even begin to cover it.

At least, y'all, we are not in the northeastern states that are about to get slammed with a major nor'easter that could be dangerous and deadly. I'd much rather have our wild and wacky weather than the stuff they're going to see the next few days.

Dawn

Dawn, what else will you add to your Hugelkultur bed? I see where others have added kitchen scraps, older, not yet rotten, scrap wood, charcoal from fire pits (I don't think they mean from briquettes), half-finished compost and vermicompost, straw, litter from chicken coops, and branches and twigs from around the yard.

I think Oklahoma has some of the most erratic weather patterns in the nation, corner to corner and crosswise. Forecasting the weather here, as I saw it described somewhere, is like trying to determine where a bubble will surface in a pot of boiling water - virtually impossible at times. I think our weather forecasters do as good a job as the predictors they base their evaluations on. Even so, I have seen the forecast anywhere from "spot on" to "way off".

My DD lives about 5 miles West of me, and I often see such a difference in rain patterns between her house and mine (as in she's getting tons of rain and I'm receiving none) that it makes ya wanna scratch your head and go, "what the heck?"......

Susan

Susan, I'll add anything and everything I can get my hands on. Luckily, with a large woodland, gigantic compost pile and two coops full of chickens, I won't have to try real hard to find materials. They are all over the place here. We never throw anything away that can be recycled so we have lots of compostable material to use in the combination hay bale/hugelkulture beds. I likely had enough hay to fill in the interior of the beds only with hay, but wanted to use some half-rotted wood from the woodland for added moisture-retention and want to add other organic matter for the diversity it brings. I likely will have a field mouse problem because anywhere you have hay bales stacked up, the mice like to move it and nest, but I'll just deal with that when it happens.

I agree that even a few miles make a difference, weatherwise. Sometimes friends of ours who live within a mile or two (or less), south or north of us get rain when we don't, and vice versa. It is maddening.

Once, I stood in my yard and watched it rain, while across the barbed wire fence 20 or 25' away, the neighbor's place wasn't getting rain. It was so odd. I know that rain has to stop someplace, but rarely have I been outside watching it rain and been able to see where the rainy area stops and the non-rainy area begins.

Dawn

Dawn, I hope the snakes don't think you are building them a new resort with a place to stay cool and plenty of food delivered right to their door.

That makes two of us. It is one reason I generally avoid above-ground hugelkulturs (except I use them to fix badly eroded gullies far from the house) and straw bale beds. It also is why I don't turn the compost pile in snake season. It is just that faced with the atrociously hard clay north of the barn, there are not a lot of options. Hauling in purchased soil to fill a 1200 s.f. area to a depth of 8-12" for planting would be too expensive, considering how much I spend on gardening as it is. So, using the hay bales as the 'edging' of the beds and filling it with hugelkultur type compostables with a layer of compost on top seems like the best way to go. The ground is so hard that when the contractor tried to level the ground before pouring the concrete foundation for the barn, he said (laughingly) that we didn't need to pour concrete because we had natural clay concrete. It is the kind of soil that is a gardener's nightmare, so I feel like the only way to go in this case is above-ground, and I want to do it as cheaply as possible.

I am sure we'll have mice and snakes in the new garden areas this year. I still have them in the old garden areas that have been worked for 14 years because wild things are gonna live in the wild, and just because we live here doesn't mean they all pack up and go away. It is just part of gardening in the bend of the Red River with an incredible amount of wildlife. At least it is only rodents and snakes that I usually encounter--we've only had feral pigs on our property, as far as I know, two years of the 14 we've been here. There isn't much that sends me scurrying into the house faster than the sounds of feral pigs coming my way.

You know, field mice, voles and even venomous snakes aren't my worse wildlife problems here, so I guess I'll just deal with them because it could be worse.

One of our distant neighbors--about 2.5 miles from us-awakened and heard an odd sound one night. Thinking the dog probably wanted to go outside, the gentleman got up and went to the door. On his way to the door, he found a skunk in the house looking for a way out. At least I've never found a skunk in the house, so things could be worse.

Usually if I plant enough catnip and catmint near a garden bed, the cats hang out there a lot and kill the mice and voles. Without field mice and voles, the snakes don't come around much, so I'll be planting tons of catmint, catnip and cat grass, inviting the small domestic felines to come play and hunt. I think I have 4 or 5 varieties of cat plants started in flats in the greenhouse already, and a couple more to go. Already, two of the cats can be found early in the day prowling around the hay bales, so I think they already are on the hunt.

Last year, for all the snakes I found in the garden, only two of them were venomous, which is actually an improvement over the early years when there were a lot more venomous ones around.

I'll likely line the garden fencing around the hay bale garden with deer netting. If you use the deer netting that has 3/4" or 1" openings in the netting, a lot of the larger snakes try to squeeze through the openings and get caught before they make it into the garden. That worked pretty well in the Peter Rabbit Garden.

I suspect that you will always have snakes, since they kind of have a perfect environment there by the river. You would think that I would have them here by the lake, but I think they must stay near the water because I have never seen one.

One day when we lived in Lone Grove, I heard Al answer the phone and say, "OK, I'll be right there." He hung up the phone and said, "She has a snake in her house." I just assumed it was the elderly widow lady that lived nearby, but I looked out the window and never saw him go that way. It was actually the woman that lived up the road behind our house and I was surprised she even had our phone number. We knew her husband and her grown son, but she almost never talked to us. I don't know if her kitchen window didn't have a screen or the snake was able to push it open or what, but Al said it crawled into the window above her sink. Can you imagine?

A couple of hundred years ago when I was in high school, there was an oil lease property of some sort, refinery maybe, on Cheek Road south of Lone Grove. Some of the employees had houses there and one of the houses got Rattlesnakes in it. They started finding little rattlers all over and had to move out for a week or two until they had someone come in and clear them all out. They had kids about my age and I had been there many times, but after that I was never quite as comfortable. LOL I'm not a good friend of snakes, because I don't know the good ones from the bad ones, so they are all bad to me.

Dawn, friends of mine had a skunk trapped under their house this winter. It sprayed at least four times. Every time the heat would come on the house would fill with. Eau de skunk. Their daughter spent a couple of nights with me to get a smell free night of sleep! They think they've caught him....and apparently a gigantic possum as well!

I had a friend deliver me a large load of leaves not long ago. I was out today moving some of them to cover my stick pile which I am going to pretend is a fancy hugelkulture pile, er, I mean bed. :) the leaves are covering my squash bed, so I need to continue distributing them around so I can continue my squash saga this year :)

Hey I hear rain outside I think!

We got another 1" of rain last night, I sure wish I could put some of this in a rain bank and draw it out when I need it.

I think if you have a garden the snakes will call it home. I found a little garter snake in one of my big pots of soil last year, when I was dumping the soil. Another one, a little brown snake, was under some cardboard I had put down. It was early spring, so they were still in a state of hibernation so I just put them back in the garden to continue their rest. Both were only about a foot long.

So far, I have not seen any poisonous snakes around here, but I suppose we could. The only two venomous snakes I think we have in Oklahoma, other than 5 species of Rattlesnakes, are the Copperhead and Water Moccasin aka Cottonmouth. Cottonmouths are easily recognized because if encountered, they open their mouths a lot when threatened, revealing the cottony white interior. Water Moccasin bites are much more serious than the bite of a Copperhead; they can be fatal. Copperheads have very colorful, kind of a rust color, wide bands and are easily identified. They are not aggressive snakes except when disturbed. Their cryptic coloration makes it easy for them to hide in woodpiles, rock croppings, compost, mulch, etc., where they can blend in with their surroundings. They often come out to bask in the sun on roadways, tend to freeze when threatened, and consequently make roadkill of themselves! Their bite is not usually fatal, but can do a lot of damage. In fact, Copperhead venom is the least toxic of all of our venomous snakes. While I wouldn't get close enough to make positive IDs, venomous snakes also have what I refer to as "cat eyes", kind of oval shaped, while non-venomous snakes have round eyes. Another identifier is the shape of the head. Venomous snakes are known for their wider, flatter, spade-shaped heads.

There is another poisonous snake that might be found along the Red River (Dawn may have seen these), called the Texas Coral Snake. Wider red and black bands separated by smaller yellow bands ID this snake.

We used to see a lot of Copperheads and Water Moccasins in Kansas where I grew up. I had a very close encounter with a Copperhead, and we used to see lots of Water Moccasins or Cottonmouths down on the river where my granddad had a cabin and we fished and ran lines. Reports suggest that both Copperheads and Water Moccasins like to be near water, I never saw a Copperhead at the river, just Water Moccasins.

Keep in mind that neither of these snakes are aggressive, unless you step on them, pick them up, disturb them while you're harvesting or cleaning up the garden, or threaten them in some other way. They would much rather avoid you as you would them.

While we aren't as concerned with non-venomous snakes, they can still inflict a painful bite, too, causing lacerations, infection, and anaphylactic reactions. So, it is best to respect them and allow them to do their job, without interference. Of course, if it's a venomous snake, I'd probably get out the hoe and whack away!

Susan

Here is a link that might be useful: Oklahoma Venomous Snakes

Carol,

That poor woman! A snake outside is at least somewhat expected, but a snake inside would be a shock.

One of Chris' friends in high school lived on a horse ranch and found a rattlesnake in her bedroom one night when she was barely a teenager. I cannot imagine that happening to me when I was a teenager. I would have been hysterical. I don't care for the snakes, but the only ones that upset me are the venomous ones, and then also the rat snakes and chicken snakes that get into our chicken coops and eat eggs and half-grown or smaller poultry. I even kinda like the Rough Green Tree Snakes, but from a distance....not up too close and personal. As a side not, if a snake dies in your garden, you wouldn't believe how quickly it can stink up the place! Generally you'll find it by smell long before you see it.

We do live in an area that has wildlife that is far too abundant and I don't think that will ever change. There's just too much wild river bottom land around us that hosts all sorts of wildlife, and drought drives them up here to higher ground....and so do floods....so we're gonna have them around either way. We need them, unfortunately, to control the rodents that live in the wild, but that doesn't mean I want to be stepping on them when I'm in the yard or garden.

I am not surprised snakes seek refuge indoors, but to find a lot of them in a house would be terrifying. One of our neighbors told us a few years ago about someone he knew who finally cut down a really big old tree that had been dead quite a while and likely was hollow. When they cut the main trunk near the ground, dozens of rattlesnakes came slithering out. The way he described it, some of those people likely set a new land speed record in their haste to run as far away from the snakes as they could and as quickly as possible.

Lisa, What an awful story (and a stinky one too)! Back in the awful wildfire year of 2008-09 (not be confused with the awful wildfire years of 2003, 2005-06 or 2011-12, lol), we were at a fire in the river bottom lands east of I-35 fighting a huge fast-moving fire when we abruptly were paged to a fire well west of I-35 because a fire there was very close to a house. Tim and I raced to that new fire as fast as we could, and when I opened the fire truck door to jump out, there was a very stinky big pit bull waiting there for me. Not being particularly fond of pit bulls that smell skunky, I froze where I was until the resident came and got the dog. She said the dog had cornered a skunk under their house and a pitched and prolonged battle between the two ensued. Apparently her house smelled as much of skunk as the dog did, and then they had the added complication of a fire making everything around smell smokey.

Hurray for the leaves! Of course it is a fancy hugelkultur bed in your yard. lol I've never yet seen a fancy one, so maybe you and I are taking liberties with the English language. Every hugelkultur bed I've ever built basically looks like a brush pile with soil and compost and chopped leaves piled on top of it. Not fancy, but a great way to improve soil and recycle 'waste' material that otherwise would either be burnt or hauled to the dump. You never can have too many leaves. The very first hugelkultur bed I built in Fort Worth was beautiful. I spend far too much time digging little trenches and vetically lining up tree branches about 4 to 8" in diameter in rows in those trenches. Then I backfilled with soil to hold them upright. Once the bed was filled, the outer row of branches looked a gorgeous wood edging a flower bed, but really the whole bed was wood too with just some compost and soil added. The flowers I grew there forever after were gorgeous. I was so excited. When I built a hugelkultur bed here in our earliest years, the snakes moved in before I even could finish it. That was the last one I built for a few years. I have continued building them on top of eroded spots in order to fill in the gullies and get something to grow in a gully's bare ground, but have stayed away from them to start garden beds because well, you know, I don't like rodents and snakes!

I don't regret moving here to this specific piece of land. It is gorgeous here and I love seeing most of the wildlife. However, we do have about 1000 times as much wildlife as I expected before we moved here, and I expected to see a lot. We also have had some wildlife I never expected to see here. Life is full of surprises.

The last couple of weeks the wind here has been bringing down the autumn leaves from the native post oaks. Those leaves normally cling to the trees until at least February. Since we have a winter rye grass lawn that I have to mow anyway, when I mow I end up with a grass catcher full of grass clippings and chopped up oak leaves and the two of them together are wonderful to use as mulch or to add to the garden's compost pile. When I mowed on Friday, I dumped all those grass and leaf clippings into the hay bale beds I'm building north of the barn. I'm going to grow winter squash and pumpkins there so they can run wild and cover every square foot of ground. You know what monsters some of those squash vines can be, so I am relieved to be getting them out of the big garden and into their own spot. I cannot imagine gardening without chopped or shredded leaves. They make the best soil amendment and mulch.

I heard rain early this morning. We had about 2 hours of strong thunder and lightning and about 15 or 20 minutes of nice, steady rain. It only left 3/10s of an inch in the rain gauge and I was hoping for more, but we never seem to get that "more" nowadays. We just get a couple of tenths here and a couple there.

Larry, I agree with you. I wish we could do that, but it just doesn't work out that way. I've noticed your rainfall comes in inches and mine comes in tenths of inches. No use in me pouting about it, but I'll just say how unfair it is! : )

A lot of us have snow in our forecast for Tuesday, and what I expect will happen is that a lot of y'all will get more snow than we will get down here, if we get any at all.

Dawn

Snow? What? Where? When? How? Why? Grrrrrr.......I don't like snow - driving in it anyway. But, I know we need the moisture, so will resign myself to it.......sigh.......

Generally, skunks are not aggressive animals, and their only defense is spraying that odor around. They are terribly near-sighted, too.

Susan

Snow is coming soon (Tuesday) to much of OK. See the details on the linked webpage of the Norman NWS office. Since this morning, they have decreased the likelihood of the snow making it down here to Love County (and I am not complaining).

At the present time, the NWS shows some places getting 3-5" of snow and a Winter Storm Watch is in effect for NW OK and the panhandle.

Generally, skunks are not aggressive, but if they are out in daylight and are aggressive, as "my" skunk was last year (it chased me), they may be rabid. We automatically shoot skunks out in our yard during the daylight hours, and so does everyone around us, and we still have lots of them roaming around, though mostly at night. Last week someone in Thackerville had a skunk in their yard in broad daylight, and apparently no gun handy. So they crept out into the yard and put a trash can upside down over the skunk, effectively trapping it and holding it until someone could come there and remove it. That's a braver person than me. If there is a skunk in the yard, there is no way I am going to try to sneak up on it and put a trash can over it.

Our worst skunk experience was our first year here when our two dogs decided to take on a mama skunk and her 4 babies as they traveled across the yard from our neighbor's pasture to our creek. Then, our son and nephew tried to chase the dogs and stop them. The 2 boys and 2 dogs got skunked. The niece and I ran for the house and locked the boys out. (Didn't want a skunky house.) I had a small skunk odor removal kit, but not enough for two large dogs and two boys. Tim picked up more stuff for me on his way home from work and I got the smell mostly out of the boys and dogs that first night. The clothing? Oh, it was bad. We just threw it away and I bought my nephew new clothes and shoes to replace the stinky ones. The dogs learned a very valuable lesson. We've never had a dog chase a skunk since then.

If you're wondering how fast I ran to get away from the skunk, then the correct answer is that I ran "fast enough" to make it all the way back to the house and inside. When a skunk is running wildly towards you with a mad gleam in its eyes, you don't stop and think....you just run. : )

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Forecasted Snowfall Totals Here

OK, adding my skunk story to the mix! A daylight skunk is no good. In the middle 90s, when I was a teenager, we lived in far southern Arizona. We had just moved from Germany (Army brat) and were living in temporary quarters up in the hills of Ft. Huachuca, about 6 miles north of Mexico. My little sisters, ages 6 and 3, were having a tea party on a blanket in the yard with some of the little neighbor girls in front of our houses. I happened to be walking by the window and see them get goggle-eyed and start pointing with wide open mouths, and then I saw a skunk coming through the yards, headed straight for them. I started shrieking, and my step dad came running. He grabbed the closest thing (a kitchen broom) and raced outside to start one-handed flinging little girls at me to stash in the house. Gosh, I did not want to go out of the door. That skunk charged him over and over and he kept batting at it with the broom and sweeping it away and it would come running back. We ended up safe in the house and he hustled back in and slammed the door. The skunk left, and we had to have animal control come set traps (I believe bacon and peanut butter was the bait) because they were sure it was rabid since it tried to go for little girls. I don't recall if they ever caught it. I don't think so, because I'm sure they would have tested it for rabies and told us.

Scary!

I also have a skunk story, or at least my husband does.

Our house is partly built on a slab and partly on a foundation with a crawl space. When we moved here it was hard to find a house, but we found this one on a rent/buy agreement. I was still in southern Oklahoma and Al was here by himself. Seems there was no door on the crawl space and the house had been empty for awhile, so a skunk moved into the crawl space. Before we changed out all of the duct work, it had that stuff that looked like a huge clothes dryer vent hose.

I guess maybe he could feel the cold air from the AC unit on the outside of that pipe, so he decided to go inside. I guess he made it in, but couldn't make it out. He died in the pipe. Without knowing that the skunk was in the venting pipes, Al had all of the windows closed and turned on the air conditioner. He called me to tell me he had all of the windows and doors OPEN and all 6 ceiling fans on, and he was still about to choke, in addition to burning up from the heat.

The owner sent someone out to get it out, but even a week later when I came up, there was still a faint skunk odor. Needless to say, all the duct work has been changed and a new air conditioner installed, but first I built a new door and put on the crawl space. The year we had the AC unit replaced a possum found it's way into the crawl space before we got everything sealed back up. It seems that Grand Lake animals like climate controlled areas. LOL