I have been thinking the same thing recently about the weather and also the fruit set on the tomatoes. Our weather conditions are close to the same as I live west of Ardmore. I am getting my shade cloth ready as July is just around the corner. So far the garden looks very good, this last rain was just in time. Best of luck with the garden and the canning.

Rick

It is very nice here, also getting a nice rain.

The garden looks pretty good even though I am having some insect an disease problems.. I still have onions and beets to harvest and the tomatoes are smaller this year because I have been trying to get by with no feeding or watering, but I expect that will change before long and I will have to install the irrigation tubes.

Larry

Oh man! Talk about a day to garden. Cloudy, cool and just moist.

Larry, I did that my very first year. Was 2011, a great tomato year. I didn't water enough. I harvested hundreds of tomatoes... the size of marbles and smaller. Was hilarious. Tasty salad maters, tho.

It has been the best weather here too. I am so enjoying my time in the garden. my kids were here this weekend and it was so pleasant to have a such cool breezy time in June.
kim

I totally agree that this weather has been just amazing. We will have a couple of hot days this week, but nothing like we experienced over the last 3 years. Hope everyone continues to get gentle rains.
Mary

Well, if we don't stop eating the few jalapenos I picked and so many of the tomatoes, I may not make salsa. I have lots more of both to pick though, so I think the canning starts tomorrow or the next day. I've been pleased with how well the pepper and tomato plants have been producing despite being in severe to extreme drought for pretty much all of their lives.

Today was the first time I'd crossed the Red River via I-35 since the rain fell early last week, and guess what? There is water in the river, and it is flowing downstream. That's such a big improvement over the poor, pitiful river channel lost among all the sand bars in the river bed the last few years. You couldn't even see the sand bars today! Yay! I hope this means we'll see some continued improvement in the lake levels at Lake Texoma too.

Ric, I was just thinking to myself a couple of days ago that I'd better have the shade cloth handy and ready to drag out of the garage. Even with cooler weather, I intend to use it to shield the peppers from some of the heat and sunlight.

I probably won't shade the tomato plants. I have a lot of plants and I want to do a lot of canning over about a 4-6 week period, and then I don't care what the plants do after that as long as we have a few ripe maters here and there. I don't know if our region's drought will improve any more than it already has or if it will continue to worsen, so I am staying flexible on the idea of either watering the tomatoes to keep them going all summer or not. If the drought doesn't improve, I'll likely let the tomato plants go and save the irrigation water for the okra, melons, squash and southern peas. There's only so much you can do with irrigation water when you're in Extreme Drought, and I don't even want to think about your county and mine going into Exceptional Drought, but it is creeping towards us.

Larry, Does it ever not rain there? Actually, I do remember years you've had to irrigate a lot. I have not watered my tomatoes as much as I should, but we are getting some really large ones anyhow. The rain earlier in the week helped a great deal with that. At some point, I let the garden get too dry within the last 2 or 3 weeks, and a couple of fruit on a couple of plants got BER, but it was just a handful of fruit so it was not any sort of big deal. I corrected it before it affected many fruit, because smaller fruit that set after the BER-affected ones were fine.

Bon, I am at the wrong end of the state because it was not moist here (though it was humid enough to give us a heat index a few degrees higher than our actual temperature) and it tried to get warm---hitting 93 degrees at our house this afternoon, but 93 beats 103 any day of the week.

Kim and Mary, I was wondering if you Texans would recognize green plants once everything started greening up after the rainfall. (grin) Y'all have been brown for so long there that it must be nice to look out and see beautiful, beautiful green. We drove down to the D-FW metroplex today, and I was surprised at how brown the fields are between Gainesville and Denton. I am assuming most of that brown is cool-season plants that are not, of course, going to green up again and that maybe there's short warm-season plants greening up that you just cannot see yet from the highway because we saw lots and lots of brown fields.

Our forecast looks exactly average, in terms of temperatures, for the rest of the week, and I think average temperatures will be really nice. I hope we get to have average for a while, before it creeps up to "above average". It would be okay with me if we have average or below-average temperatures all summer long, but I doubt we'll be that lucky.

Dawn