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Post by heavyhitterokra on Apr 30, 2021 10:54:23 GMT -6
Yep, the only prep for an Oklahoma tornado is, 'Run for the basement!' hopefully before you hear it bearing down on you.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Apr 30, 2021 17:08:19 GMT -6
I think we were put under tornado warning about 7:30 in the evening with the information that a tornado had been spotted near Hondo, TX and a storm with 4 inch hail was heading northwest about 45 miles per hour. Thankfully our next door neighbor had seen an alert and texted me with the information. We live fifty miles northwest of Hondo by road but shorter as the crow flies. The warning specifically instructed not to wait to hear or see the storm because the intensity of the thunderstorm was masking the tornado. We got a flashlight and big bean bags (we use them to store extra blankets, pillows, and snow suits) to sit on/shelter under and crowded in our little hallway. It is almost unheard of in this part of Texas to have a basement, so that’s not an option for us, and all our major rooms have big windows. Off of the hallway, there is a small powder room and a pantry, so if we had had to sleep there, we could have had a bit more room, but I’m glad the warning was lifted. The storm moved more east and hit more of the San Antonio area. I believe that I read that that night three big storms hit three major urban areas: San Antonio and Fort Worth, TX and Norman, OK. The more densely populated, of course, the more damage and cost.
We’re under flash flood warnings throughout tonight and tomorrow. Our property is sloped, almost naturally terraced, so we avoid really awful flooding, but we’ve had pretty violent rushing water in times past. It will be a good day to stay at home tomorrow because our main road crosses creeks on each side of our neighborhood, and those have both flooded in the past.
We really do need the rain, though, to recharge the local aquifers, and all my hand watering is nothing to good rain. My plants have been shooting up the last couple of days, and I love the break. The trees really needed this.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 1, 2021 21:27:23 GMT -6
Here, where I live, I stake my 150' foot rows of indeterminate tomatoes by driving two Tee-posts in an 'X' pattern at each end of the row. I use these as anchor posts, then, I drive one Tee-post every 20 feet, down the length of the row. I stretch a 1/8" inch aircraft cable between the 'X' anchor posts, and along each individual post down the way, using a come-along at about 4'foot-10" inches off the ground to pull the cable tight. Once that is done, I attach cable clamps at both ends and release the come along from the cable.
Once the cable tightening process is finished, I slide my 5' foot tall tomato cages just under the aircraft cable for support. The cable is only slightly lower than the tops of the cages, to supply some 'down' pressure when I place the cages below the cable. The slight down pressure helps to stabilize the cages until I can secure them in place, using hay twine. My tomato cages are placed on 5' foot centers, the whole length of each row, so the Tee-posts that are driven every twenty feet also double as a tomato stake for a single cage.
All this is done to prevent 60-70 mph thunderstorm winds from toppling my top-heavy cages once they are loaded with as much as 30 pounds of tomatoes per plant in mid-summer. It's quite an ordeal to keep them fairly safe from nature. I've harvested as much as 900 pounds of tomatoes in a single day from the 300 or so cages that I had staked out in years past.
No matter all that precaution, I have found as many as 114 tomato cages, aircraft cables, Tee-Posts and all, uprooted and lying in a twisted mess just outside my garden fence, within moments of a small tornado passing near our garden. Not a direct hit mind you, just near enough to pull all the rain soaked posts out of the ground and take off with all of them for a few yards before dropping them back to the ground.
It's amazing what high winds like that can do.
Even so, with a little fortification and forethought, one can usually manage to weather most storms with minimal damage to the fruit. A little precaution can prevent huge losses in the case of most summer storms.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 4, 2021 8:07:42 GMT -6
If a real tornado hits, no kind of tomato support system will survive. My boys and I went with a group of volunteers, from our Church, to Bridge Creek, right after that F5 tornado hit there in '99. The winds there had sucked the barbed wire fences out of the ground. There was barbed wire tangled in the treetops for miles in the direction of the 'fall out' from the high winds. At one point, the pavement was sucked up off the ground. The asphalt from the highway leading to Bridge Creek was uprooted and lying to the side of were the highway used to be. The grass was even gone off of the ground. The houses that survived in the line of fallout were caked in debris, where the huge hunks of sod had fallen from the sky, dropping bricks, concrete blocks, old tires, plywood, tree limbs, swing sets, dead chickens, or anything else that might have been airborne the night before. There were vast expanses of ground, where nothing was left, save for concrete slabs, broken water pipes, and electrical conduits with the wires pulled out of them where the houses used to be.
We saw cars and trucks there that had been rolled along the ground for so long that nothing was left except the engine and a part of the frame. The destruction there was surreal. It's a wonder anyone survived. I remember a barren street in Bridge Creek, where there was a message scrawled in spray paint along the curbside that read, "I survived the night inside this tin horn."
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 4, 2021 10:39:34 GMT -6
Since this is tornado season and agriculture is so closely tied to the weather, I'm going to start a new thread called, "Weather Lore" under, "Other Homesteading Type Topics" so our okra thread can remain an okra thread.
Here's the link: seedsavingnetwork.proboards.com/thread/516/weather-lore
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 6, 2021 21:10:28 GMT -6
Weed pulling day!
I pulled weeds all day long today. My poor aching back!There were several wagon loads. I use them to mulch my fruit trees and berry plants.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 16, 2021 9:22:07 GMT -6
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 18, 2021 18:46:04 GMT -6
Not a Total Loss. Though I would much rather have been planting seeds today, instead, I spent the whole day, driving steel fence posts, placing insulators, stringing electric fence wire, mounting a transformer, and getting 110-volt power from my campground to my garden, (hopefully to keep the deer out). Namely, our pet deer, 'Stanley.'It was a perfect day for planting seeds, just before the rains hit, but I was way too busy to get the chance before the showers began.Tired as I was by the end of the day, I got it in my head that I was at least going to plant one seed before dark. Well, here it is, dark, but I kept my word to myself and ventured out into the pouring rain a few minutes ago and planted 'one seed' before the sun went down. The day was not a total loss after all.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 19, 2021 7:26:49 GMT -6
I know, right.
Almost June and still cold mud for planting. I remember back when I was a kid, it would get hot enough to swim before school was out in May, like 90 degrees hot. What happened to all that?
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hank
New Member
Posts: 34
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Post by hank on May 19, 2021 11:26:55 GMT -6
Looking great Ron. Those are sure some impressive rows of Okra.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 19, 2021 12:19:58 GMT -6
Hopefully, they'll look a little better after the second and third planting. The extra cool weather around the first week of May was kind of tough on the trial run.
I should have planted seeds every day this week, but due to our lying weatherman, I thought it was going to be pouring rain pretty much 24/7 every day and so I never soaked any seeds to plant. The last time that happened, it rained for a solid week after I soaked them and I lost an entire batch of seeds to over germination.
I wish the weatherman would give up weather and just run for President, at least then, I'd expect him to be making things up as he went along.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 19, 2021 14:31:53 GMT -6
This is an old post, from July 1st, 2020. I really didn't know whether to put this under 'Weather Lore' or 'Heavy Hitter Okra.'
Last year, we started off quite a bit wetter than we've been this year, but the fountains dried up toward the end of June and we never got another drop until over a month later ... Hopefully, this year will be better for area farmers than the 2020 season was.
Wendell,
We haven't had any rain here in the Tahlequah area for a little over a month. The temperatures have been steadily in the 90s each day with unusually high winds. The Illinois River is running low, and the fishing here has been no good lately. If I didn't water my garden every evening, I think I'd be losing plants right now. Japanese Beetles and Flea Beetles are thick, and I saw my first squash bug this morning.
Count your blessings that you're still getting rain down in the Southwest part of the State.
I had a wholesale produce buyer come by this morning, looking for okra and tomatoes for sale. From what he was telling me, it doesn't sound like anyone in this part of the country has any fresh produce to sell. He said corn was going for $19.00 per bushel (about 40 to 50 cents per ear). Watermelons were going for $7.00 to $10.00 each, cantaloupes were selling for close to $5.00 each, okra and tomatoes are not available, and peppers are unheard of. He said even the berry producers got wiped out by the May 8th freeze. So it sounds like a person needs to thank their lucky stars if they end up with any kind of garden this year at all.
Thanks, for the update from down in the Lawton Area. It's always good to hear from other growers in the surrounding parts of the State. I'm really glad to hear someone has been getting rain. If everyone was in the same boat as we're in out here, things in the world of agriculture would be getting scary pretty fast.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 19, 2021 20:18:05 GMT -6
Bon,
All of that mulching you've done ought to help quite a bit. You've got your beds looking great!
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Post by hedgeapple on May 20, 2021 10:38:55 GMT -6
Ron: On the subject of soaking okra seeds overnight - how much is too much? I've noticed that some seeds swell quickly, while others take a bit longer. Is overnight the maximum? ~8hrs or so?
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 20, 2021 12:11:07 GMT -6
Hedgeapple,
I soak my okra seeds about 100 seeds at a time, inside a sealed Ziplock bag, with a warm, wet, paper towel folded up inside. Twenty-four hours is kind of the 'minimum'. Some seeds will begin to sprout after only 18 hours, but some might take up to 48 hours.
Since they rarely all sprout at the same time, I just plant them, one by one, as I see the little white root tip break the seed hull open. It's very important to get them in the ground as soon as you see the root tip appear, as a seedling without soil to nourish it, is like a baby without any milk to feed it, the result will be stunted growth or worse.
In my reference to 'over germination' earlier, that's what it was in regard to. I had seeds that germinated, then we had heavy rains for several days that prevented me from planting them. The result was that the seeds perished while waiting for the heavy rains to pass.
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