Yes, that is a wonderful problem! We've been getting rain, too, not too much but will take anything we can get. I had planned on starting to prune today right off my patio so wouldn't have to get too wet, but it never happened (my local spa had 35% off pedicure, so... important things first, besides, they gave me a glass of wine!) Will try for tomorrow, supposed to be 75, but a good chance of rain. Valentine's Day seems to be the set time to start in the Dallas area, but it can wait until it dries out. What I'm worried about is getting a freeze which could very easily happen.

Just use your well water Judy. You can continue to collect your rainwater, but don't worry about the well water. I use mine in all my little watergardens all the time and its not a problem (and we have a ton of iron too). Have fun!

The Other Carol (Sandplum), It was only acting up for a couple of days and didn't completely quit cooling until Monday evening. Tuesday morning Tim spoke to our HVAC guy, who said he'd send a crew out, although they couldn't get to us until the afternoon. I wouldn't have been shocked if we'd had to wait a few days given that it is so danged hot and all. They came, they fixed it and all was well, except one of them, who is a firefighter for the Wilson VFD (in Carter County adjacent to our county) and who knows Tim is a FF here in our area, told us that while he was here working, his VFD got paged out to a grass fire on Hwy 76 in Carter County. It boggles my mind that we have grass dry enough to burn, although I know it is true just from looking at our back pasture. I am not ready for the fields to start burning, and there's still a lot of green mixed with the brown so we might not have a widespread problem developing yet. Oh, and y'all can stop feeling sorry for me. I headed out the back door to get the mower out of the garage so I could mow grass early this morning and raindrops (mere sprinkles but enough to wet the grass and cancel my plan to mow) started falling on my head. It took a really long time of really light rain, but eventually we had a whole 0.06" in the rain gauge. Well, it could have been only 0.05"----when you're looking at the hundredths on a gauge marked in tenths, you're only guessing. So, there, we got rain after all. The mugginess is horrible. It is a good day to finish up the outdoor work and be inside by noon. Carol, Because I didn't want to rub our good fortune in anyone else's face, I haven't linked that map, but now that you mentioned it, I will. It is mind-blowing to see how much rain has fallen since our drought-breaking rains began falling in June 2014. I don't know if you remember but we had escalated to "Extreme" on the U. S. Drought Monitor very quickly and Lee, who works with the OK data submitted to the Drought Monitor group, gave me a heads-up here on the forum that if rain didn't start falling quickly, we would move to Exceptional Drought very, very soon. It seems like it was only a week or so later that the rain started falling and really didn't stop, except for a brief dry spell last Aug/Sept. While the 365-day map looks great now, it was closer to 80" when I looked at it sometime back in June. When you look at the map and see our rainfall for the last year, it is hard to comprehend that it took almost all of that rain to bring us out of drought. It is a monstrous number. I'd say about the last 12-15" have fallen since we made it out of drought, but I still couldn't believe it took such a huge amount to get us back into the white on the U. S. Drought Monitor map. More shocking, though, is that despite having all that rain fall, we are getting really, really dry in the upper few inches of the soil, our big pond that was full and overflowing is almost empty again, the ground is cracking, and all the beautiful, lovely green is fading to tan, wheat, brown, or just that flat, dull green it gets as it dehydrates in the hot air. The spider mite population is exploding, possibly is peaking and should start falling soon, but by then it may be too late for most of the spring tomato plants. Stockergal, I hate that y'all cannot get into the corn silage going because of the muddy fields. I'd send you all the horrible heat we have down here if I could. As much as we all long for more rain in the summer, it sometimes creates more problems than it solves. Now, y'all, here is the 12-month rainfall map. The Love County total is beyond ridiculous. I don't know if we'll ever see a 12-month period this wet again. To see it now, and to still be so dry despite all the rainfall, just really emphasizes how much rainfall can be required to end a multi-year drought. Dawn OK Mesonet Map: Rainfall For Last 365 Days

5.2 isn't that bad. I mean, yeah, it's bad, but... :-) Personally, I'd drop 9 pounds per thousand square feet when you can (assuming you don't end up seeding, which is quite likely to fail this year without supplementary irrigation). Use Encap or Mag-I-Cal in this particular instance--for other lime types, let me know what brand and we'll adjust if necessary. I very much doubt it'll take 250# to do the job, actually, not if 1340 pounds of Ca and 350 pounds of Mg are creating a pH of 5.3. Why? Because more than 9 pounds of fast acting at any one time will end up yellowing out the lawn a little bit (very much more can render it a cheerful chartreuse). It also bollixes the soil biology if you go overboard and creates zones of high/low pH. Then, in spring, hit it with 9 more pounds per thousand square feet. Late next summer, test the soil again (via Logan or UMass by preference).