looks like the rain today is falling good where the state needs it most. Thats always great to see. Hopefully it all stays below severe levels.

Today I think flooding is going to be the biggest problem by a wide margin. I've already seen a few pics of deep standing water out in western OK where it's raining, and soils are still saturated here. Be careful driving around everyone! I'll be at home trying to keep water out of our kitchen again. :/

I didn't check in on yesterday's tread, but other than being totally waterlogged, saturated, and otherwise plain downright wet, we are high and dry!

I have a feeling I'm going to regret not getting a few tomatoes in some raised beds. Hope not, cause it ain't happening this year!

Still working out the details on the plant life preservers. Hoping to make a fortune selling the patent!

The better half and I live on a ridge, so flooding is not an issue. If we can just stay away from those twisty twirly things, we'll be good.

Hi. I missed the party a couple of weeks ago. I'm sad about that. Our life is busier that usual right now...and any free time has been spent (1) building the chicken coop, which isn't quite finished to my liking. It's not predator proof in my opinion. SO, I have 2 month old chicks in a bathroom. And that's not good. BUT who can finish fortifying it in this weather?! and (2) working on the garden. It was looking so nice...well, parts of it were, but now I'm afraid all my hard work has gone to waste. Looks like I will be starting again when it dries up a bit. I was able to check on the garden this afternoon after work. The pole beans were ripped out of the ground and everything else looks really beaten up. I'm not sure how the potatoes and onions aren't rotting in the ground. Ugh. It's just so frustrating. But on the bright side, at least I can start again. I still have seeds and seedlings under the grow lights because I started too many. I was going to toss them on the compost pile. Glad I didn't.

We are on the east side right on the line between Moore and Norman. It was pretty rough here last night. Neighbors shared their cellar with my son and me. Unfortunately my husband is working nights, although that is about to end. Yay.

Sure wish I could have met everyone a couple of weeks ago. I haven't had much time to spend online, but I saw a few pics. It's nice to put faces with names.

Thank heavens we only got 1 1/2 inches out of tonight's storms. Still wading through water,

I hope everything's still in one piece down in Love County, Dawn! I see reports of tornadoes just to your south, but no reports so far on the OK side of the river.

I have been watching for Dawn to post because it appeared that there was a tornado warning inside another tornado warning in her area. I think that has now gone east of her, but there seem to be thunderstorms and flood watches really close to her also.

Carol, I'm watching too! We don't need no more stinkin' rain, but I'm afraid we are going to get more----not just tonight, but probably tomorrow and Saturday as well. What a wet week!

Last night's storm blew over my corn plants. I left them alone, figuring if they haven't straightened themselves back up by the end of Monday, I'll help them get upright again on Monday morning. It has been several years since we had strong enough wind to cause the corn to lodge. It was about shoulder high and just starting to tassel. Now it is at a crazy sideways angle and looks about a foot tall. Maybe my corn is merely sleeping.

Dawn

Dawn, just glad to see you post 'cause it didn't look good down your way. Our forecast is for a lot of rain this week also, but so far we have been lucky and have only had nice rain. My potato plants look wonderful and a couple of them do have blooms now. I would hate to get hail because I have most things in the ground now. I have a few tomato plants that had way too much water for too long, but they will probably still be OK. It isn't going to be a good onion year.

I was more worried about hail than anything else, mostly because everything has outgrown the hoops so nothing really has any protection any more. The air was feeling "juicy" by 4 or 5 pm so I felt like things were going to start happening and came in from the garden to make dinner. All I really did in the garden was pull weeds, but soft soil at least makes that task easy. After Tim ate, I was pushing him out the door and urging him to hurry hurry hurry to work so he could get ahead of those storm cells. He left really early, but I was worried it wasn't early enough. As it turned out, his timing was perfect. It is raining here again, and I'm watching TWC as he discusses the bow echo moving across north-central Texas. Guess it is Tim's turn to get hit my some weather now.

My potato plants look great too. They sure have been enjoying the moisture. I am grateful they are in the highest raised beds because otherwise I don't know if they'd survive the excessive moisture in clay soil.

It will be a good onion year if my onions can avoid getting hailed upon for the next few weeks. I had been worried that they might be too wet but their raised bed (not a very high one, but still above grade by a couple of inches) appears to be draining well enough to keep them from developing any rot issues so far. The same is true of the corn--it is really happy with all the rain that's falling. I think it will be a better bean year than pea year, which seems so strange since it turned back cool again, but the peas really stalled when we got hot and even though they are flowering and setting peas, it isn't in huge numbers yet. I took a huge leap of faith and planted both sweet corn and beans (pole and bush) a bit on the early side during a warm spell and got away with it. Our reward is that we'll be harvesting beans and corn in May, weather permitting.

I cannot believe we are at such high risk for severe storms not just Saturday, but tomorrow and Sunday as well. Oklahoma's reputation for wild May weather is well-deserved and that's what worries me. Who knows what our gardens will have to endure, weatherwise, over the next few weeks.

Thank you all for watching my weather and worrying about me. I do exactly the same thing when it is calm here and y'all are having wild weather.

Another little tornado spun up south of us when a storm got kinda ahead of the squall line in Texas. The last I heart it was headed towards Sherman. I am glad it isn't coming our way.

I now have seen the video of the Sanger-area tornado with the multiple suction vortices on TWC. I'm glad that part of the storm system stayed on its side of the Red River.

Checking in from Tuttle... The house is okay, still haven't got a chance to look at the roof in daylight, but the rest of the home is good. Everything else on our property? It's wrecked. My trees were snapped off at the trunk and my neighbor's out-building smashed through our chainlink fence right into my garden and destroyed most of it. The arbor I built last year for grapes is nearly down to the ground. Purple martin bird house that's on an aluminum pole is bent 60° over.

Me and my neighbor either got hit by a small F0 "tendril" vortex tornado, or just somehow got super focused on by the RFD from that last wave that went through.

I guess I'll just take this year's gardening off, haha. Maybe some Okra. My onions looked so fantastic this year! Every single one of them got broke over :(

Dulahey, I have an extra packet of zucchetta that I came home with from the fling....if you want it, let me know, I'll email it to you.

edit: Wait, I mean I will MAIL it you :) We can't email seeds quite yet!

dulahey, I'm glad to know ya'll are okay. Hopefully, you'll find everything in tact at sunrise. I'm sorry to hear about the damage!

We had LOTS of rumblings here in rural NE Norman, but thank GOD no bad weather. Spent most of today trying to clean up from last night's flooding.

Have I mentioned I HATE having trashy neighbors just to our NE that had enough stock-piled that it blocked our tin-horn when the water and winds broke their fence? It all floated south and hence, our place flooded. The house was safe by about 9" but the yard and beds were a total mess. My onions were struggling as it was but SHEESH! They are a total wash now. We have a large pile of dead tree pieces out at the road now (from them) and a coupla large trash bags from their debris (debit receipts, pizza boxes, water bottles, NUMEROUS drink cans...etc.). DH says to just be calm but I SWEAR - the NEXT time - I'm gathering it up, taking it to their front porch, ringing the doorbell and TELLING them I'm bringing their trash BACK to them. Rural living is wonderful, until someone gets P.O.'d and that would be me. I wish the same considerations that I knew living in "the city" extended out here....as well as the legal back up to support it. I'm LIVID!!!! (as is evidenced in my afore-mentioned rant!). Yeh, I'm gonna get the label of the "gritchy neighbor"....and I DON'T even care.

Okay...rant over. Thank you for listening/reading. I work for a large law-firm so I know how to maneuver this but I'm seriously upset. And my "neighbors" don't even know what's coming at them for the lazy stupidity. "Bless their hearts" which is redneck for "dumba$$".

I am so sorry Paula :( do you need some help?

p_mac,

you should see my pastures from the trash that gets thrown out of the vehicles. And it is a dead end road behind me so it all comes from the sorry neighbors that live behind me. Plus they sneak in my back pasture and steal the fish I purchased to stock my pond, throw their pop and water bottles and cigarette butts on the ground. Worthless as pond scum if you ask me.

Oh, it is raining here now.

Friday morning:
We're okay, here in Tahlequah. My wife tells me that it was a wild night of storms. I'll take her word for it....

George

All well hee in Durant. According to mesonet we had over 3". My two dollar rain gauge says a little over 2". Texoma rose a foot yesterday, thinking it should break 620 tonight! At one point last nigt, I thought it was going to hail, but it didnt. Not like it would damage what little is actually growing in my garden.

Dulahey, I am so sorry to hear about all the damage, but you and your family are okay. Everything else can be fixes. Your garden and yard are so beautiful and I am confident you'll have everything back shipshape in no time at all. That's too bad about the onions. You still could yank them out of the ground (if the growing tips are damaged and I imagine they are), slice or chop and freeze them to use in cooking. That's the hard thing about growing both corn and onions here---if the growing tip is broken, the plants don't regrow and produce. If by chance your outer leaves are broken but the growing tips in the center are intact, the onions might recover.

At least you didn't take a harder hit to the house---so, as bad as things look now, they could be worse. I hope the little Purple Martins were okay. Our PMs already have their second round of eggs in their nests, and the juvenile birds from the first hatch are flying and doing their share of eating the nine billion mosquitoes that the wet conditions have brought to us. (I'm just guestimating nine billion---I didn't go out and do a mosquito census.)

You know, there's tons of things you could start from seed now and still get a great harvest: squash, watermelons, okra, and even the southern peas of your choice (blackeyes, pink eye purple hull, zipper, crowder, cream, or lady peas). Don't let this weather steal your gardening joy. Even flowers and herbs would be enjoyable compared to looking at empty beds and thinking about what the storms took from you.

Earth Sister, I agree with everything you said. I'd be so tempted to take all that trash and return it to them as well, although Tim likely would stop me from doing it. I have said it many times and will say it over and over and over again: we won the Best Neighbors In The World lottery when we bought this land and moved here, having nothing but the best neighbors on all sides of us. I still cannot believe we got so lucky, and wish y'all had had the same luck we've had. It only takes one un-neighborly neighbor to ruin a neighborhood.

Busy1, I am sorry for your neighbor troubles too. Maybe the rain will wash them away.

George, How could you sleep through the storms? I got almost no sleep on Wed night/Thursday morning because our storms rolled in around 1 or 2 am and stayed loud and crazy forever. I got twice as much sleep last night so I feel like a new person this morning.

kfrinkle, I assume you got what already had come through here. It was so loud and crazy with all that lightning and thunder, and it goes without saying that none of us down here in SC OK wanted or needed more rain. Our rainfall never matches our mesonet station's either as we're several miles from them. I try to keep a running total for our place in my head and we often run higher than our mesonet station all spring and sometimes in the summer, but by the end of the year they almost always catch up with us and we end up with about the same amount.

It is good to see Texoma rising, but now we are at the point where they have to start wondering if the marinas and campgrounds are going to flood. It seems like it is always feast or famine around the lake.

So, you don't have much planted yet? Are y'all too wet? I have the whole front garden planted, but don't know how the lower portion without the raised beds is going to fare. It depends on how much more rain we get and on how quickly it comes. The back garden? Completely untouched. There's perennial herbs and flowers back there, but it is a muddy, weed-filled mess. I doubt I'll get it planted this month, but I haven't lost hope yet. It is reserved for hot-season plantings, including southern peas, okra, watermelons, muskmelons, Armenian cucumbers, winter squash, some summer squash and cucumbers, so I'd hate to not get those things planted. I still have time to plant all of them and get a harvest but the hard part is going to be just getting it to a plantable condition. If I can't get the back garden whipped into shape, I'll have to wait and plant the hot season crops as succession plants in the front garden after all the cool-season crops are harvested. That's not ideal, but it might be the best I can do with the sort of weather we are having. At this point maybe we all should be planting water cress and rice.

We had a lot of street flooding in town and cars washing off roads and into ditches and such last night, and I just want to say that it is hard to feel sympathy for ANYONE who drives around a barricade and deliberately drives into a flooded roadway. Barricades exist for a reason. At least one roadway in Love County is closed until further notice because the road washed out.

Down in the Valley View and Sanger area where they had the tornadoes and other severe weather to our south, a train derailed off the railroad tracks. Someone sent me a photo of it, but I haven't seen the news so don't know if that train was blown off or washed off or what. In the photo I can see train cars piled on top of train cars but don't know if the piling was from the force of the derailment or if weather "helped" create that mess.

Okay y'all, we can keep talking about the weather and its effects on our homes, yards and gardens on this thread all day, but y'all know I will go and start a Friday Check-In Thread later this afternoon. If you aren't watching the weather to our west/southwest, there's already a Tornado Watch active in west Texas for a whole bunch of counties in the area covered by the NWS-San Angelo and NWS-Lubbock. I haven't looked at the radar yet to see if the party has started, but once it starts, those storms could roll towards SW or W OK.

What are we going to do if we can't spend the weekend out in our yards and gardens???? I'd rather be out there in the yard or garden doing chores---mowing, edging, pruning, weeding, anything.......and instead we'll likely be inside watching the radar and running to our storm shelter locations and hoping to escape further damage. Rainfall is good but too much at one time is not, and it seems like we are only getting the kind of rain that is accompanied by severe weather this spring. Whatever happened to a nice, slow, kind, gentle, easy-going spring rainfall?

I hope the western OK lakes are able to refill the way the ones in central and eastern OK are. The Red River is looking bigger and crazier every day now.

Dawn

Dawn,

Mother said they floated off the track due to flooding. My sisters house was in the path of the tornado but veered more north right before it got to her house. Her and her little ones huddled in the pantry for hours. She was so scared she thought she might have a heart attack. I prayed for her to pass out so she wouldn't be so scared : )

Dawn, yeah, I have tried planting some hot season crops, and they have gotten washed away twice. There is about 1/5 of the garden that I have not even dug up yet either. I really do want to plant some heavy hitter okra next week, so I really have to spend some time on the gardens. The lettuce garden is overrun with weeds and the lettuce is dirty as sin due to the rain pummeling it down into the dirt. Semester is nearly over, so I am hoping that I can spend a little more time on the gardens.

Kim, Thanks for the train update. I knew your family was fairly close to the tornado-warned area but wasn't sure how close.

Imagine how much water it takes to move train cars. Craziness. Your poor sister. I'm glad she didn't actually have the heart attack or pass out....that would have scared the little ones.

Kfrinkle, I got so tired of the dirty lettuce issue that I started raising it only in containers. My favorite is a big long cattle feed trough on legs, although I didn't put lettuce in it this year. I might in the fall. Even triple-washing the lettuce doesn't always seem to remove all the dirt, but when I have it in containers, with the ground well-mulched beneath and around the containers, I have a lot less trouble with dirt.

If the forecast is correct, you and I will need to buy our lettuce some scuba gear. Check out the 7-day Qualitative Precipitation Forecast linked below. All the rain is about the last thing we need around here.

Dawn

Latest QPF

Luvincannin, I feel for your sister, I hope she and the little ones are ok now. I know that fear and it can last for some time.

Its the strangest thing. There are 5 of us and the middle 3 are completely blasé about storms, respectfully. But the oldest and youngest are terrified. And now my little sis' kids are also terrified.

Oh dear, that is not good. I do think that if a parent shows their fear, the little ones learn to be afraid too. I also think pets pick up on their human companions' fear and feed off of it.

I understand the fear, though, and the best way to fight it, I believe, is to have a good plan for seeking shelter. If the pantry is her best shelter option, that might be worrisome. If a storm hits the house, canned food and other stuff in the pantry could go airborne and hit people in the head. You probably wouldn't want to mention that to her if the pantry truly is her best option because it only would worry her more.

We didn't have a storm shelter when we moved here, and at that point our pantry was our best option because it is deep and runs under the staircase, so it is long and narrow and you can go way back up under the stairs. We moved here in early spring 1999. OKC got hit by the tornadoes in early May 1999. We were sleeping and had no idea that there were tornadoes until all our friends and relatives in Texas started calling us to see if we were okay. (There were no storms here that day that I remember.)

After we saw the damage from the OKC storm, we went out the next day and bought a NOAA weather radio. Then, we redid our list of things we wanted to build (a screened-in porch, a deck, a patio, a detached garage with extra space to use as a shop and for storage, a greenhouse, a bigger and better chicken coop, a potting shed and a tornado shelter) over the next few years and moved the storm shelter to the top of the list. By the spring of 2000, we had the storm shelter, and my greenhouse fell to the bottom of the list. We've worked our way through that whole list now, item by item and it took us at least a decade to get it all done but I've never regretted moving the storm shelter to the top of the list. There are some things that are needs and some that are just wants. All those other things we built were wants, but in this part of the country, a tornado shelter should be considered a need.

Another thing I don't understand is community shelters. I think they are great if you're at a school event, for example, and can seek shelter in the school's basement or safe rooms. That makes sense. What doesn't make sense to me is for people to leave their homes and walk or drive anywhere from a block or two to a mile or two to seek shelter in the courthouse basement or some other community shelter. How is it smart to go out into a severe thunderstorm with lightning and strong wind, hoping you'll get to a community shelter before a tornado arrives? What if you are wrong and you're out there in the middle of the road where the tornado hits you?

After living here a while, I've developed the belief that tornado shelters of some sort should be mandatory for every single building that is built here in this state. No ifs, ands, buts or exceptions. Will it add a little to the cost of construction? Certainly, but you cannot put a price on human lives. The last new home built in our neighborhood has a large safe room built into a bedroom. It doubles as a huge closet, and I think it is a great asset for the homeowners to have that. When we put in our tornado shelter, it was the only new one around, although some of our neighbors had old tornado shelters from the 1940s through the 1970s. Now I'd say 2 out of every 3 homes on our road have tornado shelters, and it is similar on other roads nearby. Everyone I know has an open shelter policy where they've made it clear that their shelter is open and available to anyone who needs shelter at any time, so that the folks who have not yet installed shelters know they can go to a neighbor's shelter.

Our shelter is fully stocked with supplies so we could spend the night in it, or the entire day, if we had to.

Have y'all seen the news stories (I saw it on News 9's webpage) about the woman's tornado shelter that floated up out of the ground? Now that is disturbing but maybe not surprising considering the incredible rainfall totals this week. I'm surprised any of us have anything still alive in our gardens at all.

I saw that one, Dawn!!! It looks like an alien space ship!!!!

Here are a few pics of Wednesday night's flood results:

The drunk potatoe bed.

The water line in the pepper/onion bed.