Drought and Survival

This last year 50 miles made a tremendous difference here locally.

Maybe I need to include “swamp” in my handle??
I will take a drought over a flood any day. At least you can still access your land. You can still go fishing. This flooding kills a lot of animals outright and displaces a lot. Ground nesting animals like turkeys have little reproductive success. I cant even plant my garden
 
I may be swinging back to flood the way this extended winter is going. Over the weekend I still had 10" of snow on my plots and trails, and a couple feet in drifts in the yard. I just picked up 6" of heavy snow, and there is more coming.
 
In my case, my neighbor has 80 acres of irrigated ground on my south border. So he'll have good odds of a nice large food plot there for me.
 
We’ve gotten a little the last couple weeks. It comes with the threat of severe Tstorms and tornadoes but at least we got some rain out of it. Almost four inches in the last two weeks.
 
We’ve had plenty of rain and snow thru last few months. The incessant continual high winds have kept the ground dry regardless and forest fires have been a real problem for months. But ground temps are really slow coming up. My plots are slowest spring growth I can remember. And trying to get grass in my new yard has been exhausting.


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We’ve had plenty of rain and snow thru last few months. The incessant continual high winds have kept the ground dry regardless and forest fires have been a real problem for months. But ground temps are really slow coming up. My plots are slowest spring growth I can remember. And trying to get grass in my new yard has been exhausting.


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That's a good thing for fruit tree blossoms. If it stays cooler until the last frost and the fruit trees bloom later it should make a bumper year for apples.
 
The rain continues to bypass us. Sister-in-law living 60 miles SE of us got 4” last night. We got a half inch. Father-in-law living 13 miles west of us got a tenth. Wheat is enjoying the sparse rain, but nothing else is; ponds are the lowest I’ve seen. They’re even lower than ‘11 and ‘12 at this point.
 
Missed another good rain; I simply don’t see how it missed us this time. Got less than a tenth. April what brings May flowers??
 
Continuing to miss the rains, the umbrella persists. The entire state of Arkansas and half of Missouri getting good rain today, not us. Will have to begin watering trees if we don’t get something in the next couple of weeks.
 
Continuing to miss the rains, the umbrella persists. The entire state of Arkansas and half of Missouri getting good rain today, not us. Will have to begin watering trees if we don’t get something in the next couple of weeks.
300 miles south of you, it is flooding - rivers rising, water in the bottoms. Come get some. ;)
 
Early hay season is already a wash a local cattleman told me yesterday. He said if we don’t get rain in the next 2-3 weeks the warm season grasses will begin to suffer as well. After a poor hay season last year, it’s beginning to look really bleak for this year. We missed another rain this morning, and the 10 day outlook isn’t good. Drying up ponds isn’t the only issue for us right now.
 
The rains missed us again, got 15 hundredths. I can’t remember a dryer spring, even back in ‘11 and ‘12 we had some rain in the spring at least. Our chance overnight was 100% they said a couple hours ago, now it’s down to 20%.
 
I wish I could send you some of my surplus. I’ve got water running in places I’ve never seen it run. And everything is full. When things are normal (this is closer to normal) my biggest resource concern is oxygen. I wish I had more and deeper ponds dug. This feels like a missed opportunity to have this flowing away.

That being said, most of this will stay on my place. It’s the extreme overage that will trickle away. I just happened to hit the perfect storm for these conditions: excess snow, rapid rise in temps, and inches of rain.

These pics were yesterday afternoon.

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We were lucky and got close to 3” so far in southern OK. I broadcasted some milo into a few cereal grain/clover plots. There were some bare spots after having no rain for a while.


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Still puzzling, how have we gotten so little rain when it remains so close to us? This has been a very curious extended dry spell…
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Might have a decent chance for rain the next couple of days. Forecasts are all over the map, pun intended.
 
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