Carol, I an glad you got rain, we also received some but not near what you got.

Carol, you lucky lady! Congrats on getting that "liquid sunshine" as they call it in Jamaica.

I don't recall it being so dry, or maybe it is just affecting me more as I get older. It just seems like when I walk out the door in the morning, the dry air just sucks the moisture from my skin, hair, you name it.

Susan

Carol, Lucky you! I am happy for you while simultaneously being green with envy. I remember rain....I know what it looks like, feels like and smells like, but we sure haven't seen any lately.

Susan, Ditto on the dry skin. When the wind is strong out of the south we have been having half-decent humidity, but man oh man, when it comes out of the north, the air is so dry. Today our afternoon humidity bottomed out at 14%. It makes my skin feel like it is cracking.

Dawn

Great, Carol. We didn't have our rain gauge up, but a straight sided bucket had almost 3/4 inch. We need more but we're sure glad to get that. We've been frantically vacuuming leaves for a month. Now we can take a break. Have some that must be burned because they are in rocky brushy areas. Now we can do that.

I hate to vacuum leaves. I only have a leaf vac/blower and it is such a dirty job and makes me cough, plus the bag fills up in a heart beat. I usually just blow the ones in my yard onto a tarp then we take them to the garden.

Most of my garden gets covered with leaves from the neighbors. One neighbor has a lawn tractor and a really big bagger. It chops them as it picks them up so a 4x4x4 foot cube holds a lot of chopped leaves. Two houses, with large lots, use this and then just drive to my yard and dump them. When I got home from Utah, I had a huge pile. We moved all except about 3 wheelbarrows full before we started having those bad windy days. Al wet them down after they were in the garden, but that nice rain really wet them down. Once they are wet they don't move much. I hope I get more leaves. I should have had them all moved, but I have been trying to get all of the grass roots dug up before the leaves go on. I didn't keep up with the weeding this summer when it got so hot, but I don't want to deal with it in the Spring.

Dorothy, has your asparagus died back. The raised bed is still partly green, but those few I have in the ground look just like they did in the summer.

AS for the rain, the TV said we got about a half inch, the Mesonet said .65, so I guess we were just luckier than most to get 1.4. I think the north end of your county got about the same amount we did. I was already in that tiny little sliver where the drought isn't quite as bad as the rest of the State, but was still quiet dry.

We wear those little white respiratory masks when chopping up and shredding leaves. The mask look silly (the dogs and cats look at us like we've lost our minds), but generally no one sees us since our house sits back so far from the road, and the nearest house is about 100 yards away with a woodland between them and us. I've also occasionally worn those when multiple days of wildfires have left the skies filed with smoke that just won't disperse and go away.

We haven't had rain in only about 3 weeks, but the ground is so dry you'd think it had been months and months. It looks like we'll end the year about 11-12" below our average annual rainfall, but that will be for the second straight year, so we are building up a huge rainfall deficit long-term that we'll never recover from completely. I remember that in the drought of 2008, some Carter County ranchers said their ponds, creeks and soil never really recovered between the drought of 05-06 and the drought of 08-09. It seems like that is happening more and more in this part of the state---you never get full recovery in between prolonged droughts.

The tree foliage stayed green really late this year, and then when it finally changed colors, the leaves fell fast. We've been collecting them using the riding mower and its grasscatcher which makes it a fairly easy process. Raking them out of the woods by hand and collecting them by hand takes a lot more time, and I usually don't start that until we've had a prolonged spell of really cold weather because I don't want to rake up any snakes along with those leaves. I have seen snakes in the woods as late as the end of November and as early as February, so my window of opportunity to gather leaves there is fairly brief.

I hardly use the leaf vac at all because the bag does fill up quickly. I rake and bag the leaves in the woods, packing the leaves into leaf bags as tightly as I can and then I drag the big heavy bags up out of the woods.

Lately Tim mows and just dumps the grass clipping and chopped leaves into molasses feed tubs for me. When I get a chance, I take them into the garden. One day I was doing something else, and by the time he finished mowing he had filled up over a dozen molasses feed tubs and three big trash cans. I mulched my entire winter garden with the clippings and leaves from that one mowing. Now I am dumping them on top of empty beds so winter weeds won't sprout and grow in them all winter long. The winter rye grass decomposes and helps the leaves break down faster. By April, the leaf/grass clipping mulch from November and December is almost compost already. Then I have all those bags of leaves from the woods to put on the beds as a new layer of mulch after the plants are up and growing.

If you look at year-to-date rainfall, it is readily apparent that no one in OK has had enough this year.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful:...

Well, you lucky duck!!! No rain here, but it was a lovely warm afternoon, perfect for digging out bermuda grass. :)

Moni