Here, in Duncan, we had a few sprinkles out of this last go 'round. Yesterday's storms gave us a lot of wind, and that was about it. Broke some of our glads, but we salvaged them and they make a nice display in the house.

As for all the cloud cover? I'm starting to feel as if we're living in the Pacific Northwest! We haven't seen the sun for more than a few hours at a time for quite awhile, now.

Personally, I'm not so concerned about the cloud cover as I am about the day when the sun returns in full force. In a sense, it'll be like having hothouse plants in the garden, instead of having direct sowed almost everything.

At the moment, I don't think some of the plants are as dark a green as they should be, and the grass is certainly a lighter color of green than it should be.

In a week or so, we'll give everything a shot of all-purpose Miracle Grow and give it all a boost going into summer, like we do every year. We'll do the same about once a month until things cool down this fall.

We have a couple of beds in our garden that I'm concerned about wrt amendments and compost. That soil is still a bit 'heavy' for its intended use. Otherwise, the rest of our beds are in pretty good shape. Over the last year, we've added everything from composted manure to cotton burr to homemade compost and peat moss and leaf litter more. All of it has been mixed to at least a foot deep. Depending on the intended use, some of the beds have been mixed to a depth of almost twenty inches.(Most of the dirt on this property was unamended hard pan when we started our garden.)

Be careful about adding un-composted leaf litter to your garden each and every year, year after year. In using such raw organic materials, change up and 'rotate' every year. e.g. use straw one year, a little sawdust the next, leaf litter the year after that, and so on. Keep an eye on the nitrogen too. Some of that raw material can use up nitrogen like nobody's business. The same with raw organic materials. Some of them can lower the pH so much that you can't grow anything. For example, leaf litter will lower the pH, often dramatically.

Our big problem on our property is high pH. This clay has a pH of 7.8 in its unamended state. We added two inches of peat moss and mixed it in pretty deep, but that only brought the pH down to 7.4. I want it to be close to neutral for most of our beds. Nitrogen was a little low, so we might go ahead and mix in leaf litter again this fall, add a little blood meal, and then use something else next year.

All we had here was wind and rain and I doubt there is much damage, except it is likely some of the corn was blown over. I haven't walked down to the garden to look at it yet, but know from experience that wind in the 30s and 40s will blow down some of the corn and then it will straighten itself up without any help from me about 95% of the time.

We have 1.25" in one rain gauge this morning and 1.5" in the other, and they sit about 100' from each other, but our mesonet station recorded 3.5" of rain and we had some flash flooding in the portions of our county where the heavier rain fell.

Today looks to be another very windy day, and the risk of severe weather remains high for much of the state, so we'll see how our gardens look tomorrow I guess.

The cloud cover generally is not an issue. First of all, the plants are still getting light--they just are getting less of it. The plants are fine and, if they are smart, they are enjoying the cool, cloudy days because once the summer heat sets in, they'll be sweltering in too much intense sunlight and heat. Has growth been perhaps a little slower this season? Of course. Remember that the plants had recurring very cold weather, including late frosts and freezes, through the first week in May. The colder soil and air temperatures can slow down growth. Most have had plentiful rainfall in May (except for the people in the panhandle, we all need to be praying they get some rainfall up there!) and, while rain is good, too much rain can clog the root systems and interfere somewhat in nutrient uptake. This manifests itself generally as slower growth and off-color foliage that can range from a yellowish-green to a purplish-green, depending on how lacking they are in nutrition because the roots are clogged.

My plants are a little paler in color, too, than I like, but all we need is a sunny week to dry out the soil and they'll be fine.

Soil improvement is important, but even in unimproved and unamended soil, most plants will produce surprisingly well. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work to improve your soil, because we all should and most of us do, but it does mean that you still can get a decent harvest even in the early years of your garden, long before you feel like the soil has arrived at the 'excellent' status you're striving for. Soil improvement never ends because "heat eats compost", so no matter how much organic matter you add to soil, the organic matter does break down really fast in our long, extremely hot summers so we always have to be adding more. Most of my soil improvement nowadays comes in the form of organic matter used as mulch. As the mulch decomposes it feeds the soil and the soil feeds the plants and I keep adding more mulch on top of the decomposing mulch and the process just repeats itself continually.

Our soil was horrific when we moved here. You could make red clay pots from it. In some areas where we haven't done soil improvement, it still is that way as we discovered when the shifting of the clay in extreme to exceptional drought broke our water line twice in 2011 and once in 2012 and we repeatedly had to dig in that dense red clay (speckled with bits of gray clay) to repair the water line. In areas where we have gardened, the red clay is now a brownish sandy loam at least in the top 8 or 10" of the soil, then is slowly gets redder and clayier the deeper you dig. I try to double dig one long raised bed in the big garden every winter and amend the entire double dug area, and then that bed is where the main tomato planting goes. That means every major raised bed only gets double-dug about once every 7 or 8 years, but considering that the soil broke shovels and you couldn't dig it at all in the beginning, being able to double dig shows huge soil improvement over the years.

Our soil pH tested just over 8 when we first moved here and our water tests at 8.2 to 8.3, but with many years of amending and with tons and tons of chopped and shredded autumn leaves and also finished leaf mold added as well, much of it now is in the 6.8 to 7.0 range, though irrigation works against me since I have to use such alkaline water. Our first few years here, I added every form of organic matter and other soil amendments I could get my hands on including various forms of compost, manure, lava sand, greensand, dry molasses, blood meal, bone meal, etc. Our place was just a fallow farm field when we bought it, though cattle had been run on it since the farming stopped a couple of decades earlier, and it was pretty depleted in terms of nutrients and organic matter.. After I started planting, I started encountering cotton root rot and it took several years of heavy amending to get that area improved enough that cotton root rot wasn't an issue any longer. Oddly, a band of deep sandy soil (perhaps an old silted-in creek bed or contour swale) runs along the western edge of the garden and, while sandy soil sounds wonderful, it was almost pure sand and silt with no clay and no organic matter so it drained so fast I couldn't keep anything alive, even with irrigation, in it during the summer months for our first few years here. Finally, by about 2004 we had amended it enough that plants could survive the summer in it. In some ways, fixing sand that drains much too quickly is harder than amending clay that won't drain at all.

Because we have such a high soil pH and I need to do everything I reasonably can to lower it, leaf mulch is the ingredient I add every year though I also am constantly adding other materials throughout the year as mulch. Grass clippings alone put as much nitrogen into our soil as most plants need, and we have a virtually endless supply of them since we have to mow several acres. I tend to add grass clippings, old spoiled hay and straw and some home-made compost year-round as mulch, and add lots of chopped and shredded leaves in the fall, and leaf mold/composted autumn leaves in late winter before planting time. One thing I never have to worry about here is having anything turn my soil too acidic.(I wish!) With a high natural pH of the soil and water, it is a constant better just to keep it near the neutral range. It doesn't really matter what you add as long as you add 'stuff'. I use anything and everything I can get my hands on that qualifies as organic matter, but am very careful to always make sure all animal manures (cow, rabbit, chicken) are completely composted before adding them. We also use cover crops and grow some compost/green manure crops which are grown purely for use as compostable material.

The biggest sign that our soil is reaching the desired state of tilth and texture? When we first moved here, we had a few earthworms but no snails and slugs. There were some sow bugs and pill bugs (they are decomposers and there wasn't much organic matter for them to decompose), but not excessive numbers. Over time, the earthworm population has skyrocketed, as has the sow bug and pill bug population----so much so that I have to work now to control them. If their population gets too large, they start climbing plants and eating tomato fruit, for example. About 3 or 4 years ago snails returned, in low numbers at first and now in much higher ones. As a gardener, you're never truly happy to see snails or slugs, but still, in our garden it was an important sign that the clay soil had become loamy clay soil with at least adequate organic matter.

If you watch your soil and your plants, they will tell you when they are happy, as well as when they are not. Then, as the gardener, it is your job to figure out what needs to be 'fixed' in order to make the plants happier. Nine times out of ten, they are unhappy due to soil/nutrition conditions or moisture levels (too much is as bad as too little). Sometimes it is just air temperatures making them uncomfortably hot or cold and other times you may have pest issues. For all the pests that I see in my garden every year, I rarely have the kind of damage that requires I do something drastic to fight them. Generally I just do all I can to attract beneficial insects and then rely on the beneficial insects to kill the pest insects. One thing you learn as a gardener is that you cannot control everything, and you just have to go with the flow sometimes. Plants are amazingly resilient, and with all the challenges we face gardening here, that is a good thing.

I don't think feeding plants with a water-soluble fertilizer will help if the issue is that your plants are waterlogged. You'd just be adding more water. Sometimes when waterlogging is causing foliage to be off-colored, you just have to be patient and wait for the soil to dry. Organic fertilizers like Espoma Garden Tone and Tomato Tone are wonderful but, unlike synthetic fertilizers, these are slow-acting (which is great for the plants) so you don't see a big, fast boost, which is fine. You just see the plants gradually get happier.

I don't use many synthetic fertilizers except for plants in containers, where heavy watering leaches out nutrients continually, but there is nothing wrong with using them if that is your choice. One way I do like to use Miracle Grow is to boost flower production in summer once the temperatures are so high that they impede fruit production. What I do is watch the forecast carefully for a "cold front", which normally is accompanied by rain, and then about 3-5 days before it is expected, I feed my tomato plants and sweet pepper plants (and maybe the hot peppers, but only if it is so hot that they aren't setting fruit, which rarely occurs) with the MG Bloom Booster formula. It sort of primes them to be ready to bloom, and then during the cool spell or immediately after it, I'll usually get heavier blooming and some fruit set. This method works most years, but in 2011 it didn't, mostly because we never got that summer cold front that would drop temperatures back to a decent level.

It is sunny here today and I am enjoying seeing the sunshine, but it likely won't last long. Just wait until July or August.....we'll likely be complaining then about the relentless sunlight and we'll be hoping for clouds!

This has been a great year for transplanting stuff. You can almost dig something up, move it and forget it! That's a nice change of pace from the last couple of years. I still need to find some kind of bush to put in the front of my house before the sun comes back full force! I've tried hydrangeas there a couple of times, but it is too sunny there.

Hmmm...now I wished I had picked up some of those knockout roses on the dead and dying rack at lowes last week. That might have worked there.

Or maybe a snowball bush?

Hmm...sorry off track :)

Yes, it has been a great time to transplant. I have been digging up all kinds of volunteer seedlings from reseeding annuals in the big garden out front and moving them to the new garden in back. While the wind has been beating up on them a little, they have tolerated it well and I think the cloudiness is the reason why.

How many hours of sunlight does the front of the house get? Do you have any crape myrtles in the front? There is a gorgeous new line of crape myrtles (actually I have seen two separate but similar lines) this year that has very dark foliage....purplish on one line (the Southern Living one) and almost black on the ones I've seen at Lowe's (and we bought three of those). I'll link a photo of one of the new crape myrtles.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Black Diamond Crape Myrtles

Dawn, I saw some of those this week. Very interesting! ...probably a little too tall for that area. The spot I am thinking about is on one side of my front steps. That corner faces E NE (I think! I live on a curvy street and it messes up my sense of direction.) My vitex tree is in front of it with a pathway in between. I would think it should be shady there, but it must have more sun than it would appear. I have hydrangeas on the "east" side of the house, but they struggle, especially the Nikkos. My Endless Summer one bounced back better and faster than either of the Nikkos.

I have a well established azalea on the other side of my front steps.

I have very happy carrots!! They LOVE this weather!! Of all the vegetables to obtain in a year when I haven't any gardening "umpf" I would end up with the most cantankerous ones of the lot: those lovely "divas".

I put the seed in the dirt, though.

I live in a low area which gives me more fungus and green soil. I have fed a little nitrogen but there is not a lot I can do. The wet soil always packs harder also. I hope to grow a cover crop this year, it seems to help with drainage. I don't ever remember cloud cover causing me a major problem.

We got more rain today. This time last year I was dry, but all in all it has been a better year so far.

Lisa, I was picturing your porch and the azalea, so figured the spot had to be near the chaste tree. Do you want something evergreen? Deciduous? I bet we can think of something.

Bon, How like a diva to put in an appearance in an otherwise tough year. You just know the carrots are doing that just so they can show that they, not you, are in control. : )

Larry, We got mere raindrops, but had scary clouds, tornado/storm chasers all over our local roads, and a tornado warning. The rain probably didn't last 5 minutes. We've had too much in May, but I guess that is to make up for getting so little in April. We're still in drought, but I don't think we will be for too much longer. Unless the rain just stops, which I hope doesn't happen just yet, at least here at our house. You may be wishing the rain would stop. I hope you are alright there. Arkansas has had some rough weather today.

We had sun for part of the day, clouds for the rest, then sun again at the very last few minutes before the sun set. It hit 91 degrees here and was very humid. Tomorrow should be hotter. I don't think we'll have cloud cover endlessly. May is about to end, and June is not always as rainy, though it was in 2004 and 2007. Maybe we'll have a June like 2004/2007 when it rained all the time and was cloudy more than it was sunny. It was great for the garden in 2004, but too wet in 2007.

Dawm

Cloudy days are great for planting and transplanting. The lightening we have had has been like a shot of growth hormones in the garden. I am not, however, seeing the insects like I normally do. Very few honeybees. I saw 2 yesterday on the milkweed blooms, and they are gorgeous blooms this year. These are Oklahoma natives, Asclepias speciosa. And....drum roll....I have Monarch eggs! My last Black Swallowtail has left the Fennel to wander and eventually pupate. I had a few chrysalises that overwintered but they have all emerged and been released into universe, LOL! I have one lone Question Mark that has been flittering around and I saw her ovipositing on some elm saplings yesterday. I need to look for the eggs. QMs stack their eggs on the top of elm. Hops, or False Nettle.

Tomatos Are starting to look better. They have enjoyed the extra help of cloudy days to adjust to their new homes. I gave them MG crf tomato food with calcium. I definitely don't like feeding them MG anything but without transportation of my own right now I can't be choosy. I also gave them a small dose of fish emulsion to reduce transplant shock. They are already throwing out blossoms.

Digging up Dallis grass and Bermuda grass has proven to be a hardship on aging bones, muscles, and whatever else. I will survive but am temporarily using a cane. All I have left is to edge and mulch and that will be a beautiful bed.

Still have to plant some Japanese Morning Glories and Whirligig Zinnias. I planted seeds of Cosmos rubenza, which is a red variety that the butterflies will hopefully like.

Susan

Bon, How like a diva to put in an appearance in an otherwise tough year. You just know the carrots are doing that just so they can show that they, not you, are in control. : )

I know you're right, Dawn!

Bon, lol Carrots are so temperamental in our weather.

Susan, I have been sowing seeds, putting transplants in the ground, and digging up and moving volunteers on every cloudy day whenever I can. Today was too hot and too sunny here but tomorrow might be a good day to do it here.

We have had a moderate number of bees, though not as many as usual. They aren't real active in cloudy weather, but I see them out in sunny weather.

At our house we have had monarchs nectaring on green milkweed the last few days.

I still have several kinds of MGs to plant too, including Japanese, and several kinds of zinnias though I already ahve planted a bunch.

It is about to start getting too hot, so I am working like a dog to get the cool season crops out and their replacements in.
Dawn