Lawton Won’t Get A Break From Mowing This Summer
In the thirty-something years I've spent the summer in Southwest Oklahoma, I can only think of one or two years that it has been this wet. It's the middle of August, it's supposed to be so hot and dry that the grass stops growing until late September. What is up with Mother Nature this year?
I like doing lawn care, especially these last few years since I actually own the lawn I've put so much work into... but, by this time of the summer, that pristine weed free lawn is usually deep into the summer dormancy and I usually get to spend the hotter months doing other stuff besides yard work... but that just isn't the case in 2021.
I'll admit, 2020 was such a rough year that my normal lawn care routine just wasn't in the cards for 2021. With the pandemic and so much in the air, I didn't want to spend the money on pricey things like preemergent and postemergence weed killer. While I sort of kicked myself for not going ahead with the normal regimen, I would have wasted it anyway. Bermuda grows best when it's really hot and getting enough water. If anything, we've had an excess of hot temps and rain this year. It's honestly made my grass grow so fast, I'm mowing twice a week and still having to side-discharge just because the lawn is too thick and growing too fast to keep up.
The only other year that really stands out to me for being this wet in Southwest Oklahoma might be the summer of 2000. The family hales from the Southwestern corner of Oklahoma, between Hollis and Gould, and like we did most summers, the cousins and I spent the summers at the family farm putting in the hard work and the harder play. It was a challenging year for prepping wheat fields, we just kept getting rain every few days right after the harvest, so it was nearly impossible to get tractors into the fields to plow everything under.
Everything considered, this might be the year Farmers Almanac gets a forecast correct. They've predicted a cool and very wet September for Texoma, and if the rains pick up and continue, we might have to continue mowing into December this year.