Hi Barry,

Welcome to the forum and I am so glad you stopped lurking and let us know that you are out there! There's nothing wrong with lurking, but it is a whole lot more fun to join the conversation, so I am glad you did.

For any little thing I've said that has helped you, you are welcome. I love how we all continue to learn from one another here and to share stories not just of our successes but of our failures. I hope we never stop learning.

Do you know what worries me? After tweaking every little thing I do to accommodate increasingly hot and dry conditions, I'm afraid one of these years we'll have a wet and cool year and I won't know what to do in those conditions any more. (I'll be willing to give it a shot, though.) My last really wet, cool year was 2007, although 2010 was decent most of the year. Why does 2010 sound so long ago?

That is a shame about the whey plant. We continue to see almost continual residual effects of drought long after rain has begun falling and we start thinking it is over. I live in a cattle raising area, and the number of empty pastures that once held cattle is just really shocking.

I'm going to grow daikons as a winter compost crop next winter. This year I grew turnips and they got huge. All winter I cut off the greens to feed to our flock of spoiled chickens, and then a few weeks ago I rototilled the turnips into the ground to begin decomposing. Every week or so I go through that area with the tiller again and chop them up some more. I need that area to be ready for warm-season crops in a few weeks, and I think it will be. It is one of the least-improved areas of our garden so it needs some extra help.

I hope you'll keep us posted on how it all works out for you. No one understands the trials and tribulations of gardening in erratic weather like those of us who do it. To me, it doesn't matter if a person is in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri or even Virginia....we are bound together by the challenges of dealing with increasingly erratic weather. In our part of the country, if the drought doesn't get you, the floods will....or the hail or the wildfires or the tornadoes.....or ice storms, snow in March or April, etc. Gardening here is never dull.

Dawn

Hey Dawn,

You should check out this link! They need someone in Love county. They don't need Grady county, but I signed up anyway.

I just picked a random thread. And since this one was addressed to you I figured it'd be good.

Here is a link that might be useful: NWS - Norman CoCoRaHS