If Robert gets rain maybe I will also. The hay has been baled and hauled off of my land, now I need a rain to help regrowth. This should be a good year for hay, and also free mulch. There has been a lot of hay around here that washed away of floated in the field too long to be good hay. I got two bales from a neighbor that said all of his last years hay, except those two bales washed away from one of his places.

I expect you will get some rain out of this if Robert and I do. Much depends on the track the storm travels.

I'm hoping for rain, though I think 3-6" would be more rain in one week than I was hoping for. We've been mostly in a dry slot here the last couple of weeks with rain all around us and barely reaching us. In the last week, we've had rain several times, but it has amounted to a grand total of slightly less than three-quarters of an inch.

Some of the ranchers with bottom land along the Red River still have water standing in ruined hayfields, and tons of silt, even though the river has (temporarily) retreated below flood stage. I don't know if their hayfield grass will grow up through those thick deposits of silt or if they'll eventually have to reseed those fields. The water still standing is in pools left behind when the main body of the river retreated. In some cases, between the pools of water and the silt deposits, no grass-type vegetation is yet visible. The first cutting some of them managed to get done before the first big wave of river flooding might be the only hay cutting they get from those areas.

Heavy rainfall the last few days in SW OK is headed downstream and we have an active Flood Warning up for the Red River in Love County again. That's gonna be hard on anyone who farms, ranches or gardens in low-lying flood plain areas.

Its starting to Feel like May again. 1.23" in the last 24 hrs for us and 2.30" since last friday. I should have gotten the onions pulled before all this started but some are still green and standing so maybe they are going to get a bigger. Grapes went nuts with the heat and water as did my fruit trees. Of course I didnt get the lawn mowed and its likely to be bale-able by the end of the week.

Mike

So far the NWS Norman office has been off with their rainfall forecasts. We only got rain Friday night and then it didn't rain Saturday or Sunday. They had rain chances 50% or higher for both days.

I'm not complaining though. This humid 85 degree weather is awesome for the garden. My garden is also in a well draining area that sits higher than the surrounding ground so that helps.

No haying getting done here. I would of started this week if the rain hadn't of moved in.

My garden could use a drink but I'd rather get this haying over with. Will take me a couple of weeks if and when I get started. I'll be doing all the mowing and baling and hopefully recruit my Bil to do the raking.

I spent a bunch of money getting more haying equipment this year so I can leave the implements hooked up to the tractors. I just finished getting the baler ready, just need some dry days to get to cutting.

I have lots of hilly land and the low spots really get soft with all the water collecting there.

I have half of my potatoes dug. Maybe this evening if it don't rain I can finish them. I'd get out there now but it is just too hot.

osuengineer, We got a lot less rain the last few days than the NWS predicted too, but then in May we got a lot more than they said, so I guess it evens out over time. I admit to being green with envy the last 3 or 4 days while everyone was getting tons of rain and I wasn't getting much at all, but then it all worked out because I got the potatoes dug and Tim mowed the lawn. It also has been nice to have a few mud-free days. I haven't been having to mop up muddy pawprints and footprints umpteen times a day. In May, I wore out and broke my Swiffer and had to buy a replacement....and the local stores were mostly sold out, so I wasn't the only one.

The plants are loving the humidity. Last week we were hotter and drier and a lot of plants were looking a little too hot and tired. Even the small amount of rain we received did cause them to perk up again. It also helps to be in the 80s instead of the mid to upper-90s.

I don't think I have too much left in the garden that would suffer unduly if we got really heavy rainfall, but my garden slopes and the most important plants left (tomatoes galore and a ton of peppers and those last two onion varieties) are in the higher portion. With the lower portion, as things died from wet roots, I just plugged in herbs and flowers I was growing in large styrofoam cups to use as fillers in the garden. I waited for the soil to dry so the new stuff wouldn't waterlog and drown and so far it hasn't.

I am not worried so much about our safety up here because we have time to watch the storm travel and see what track it takes and where it is going to dump lots of rainfall. If I was in south-central through south-east Texas, I'd have the gas tank full, the lawn furniture and trash cans in the garage or shed, etc. If this storm gets organized, wind could be an issue, but the main issue I'd expect in Texas would be potentially heavy rainfall and flash flooding. Lots of people don't pay attention to storms until they are named, and this one is likely to make landfall shortly after it is named....if it even merits naming. Regardless, the rain threat exists. If I was on the Bolivar Peninsula in Texas I'd be packed up and fleeing north, especially if I lived in a low-lying flood-prone area where the roads could go under water first and trap me in my home. Remember Ike, y'all....by the time some folks thought they should pack up and flee, the roads were flooded and so were their yards, and shortly thereafter their homes.

It must suck to be a gardener in many parts of Texas this year where the flooding has been even worse than ours up here.

It is hard to hope for rain while simultaneously fearing getting too much. I'd love nice gentle rainfall, an inch or two, for the garden but wouldn't particularly love to get 3-6" this week.

Mike, If your onions are green and healthy, I'd leave them and expect them to make tons of growth. If my onions were healthy, I'd leave them until July because they will get a lot larger since they are long-day types (Red River and Highlander) that mature fairly late. They already have bulbs baseball to almost softball sized on the healthy ones, and I've pulled and discarded the rotting ones. All their foliage looks like crap from fungal diseases, though, so I think I'll have to pull them quickly after the rain stops if we get more than 1-2". I worry the rain will spread the fungi. With 25.5" of rain in May, I am amazed I have onions that are still alive, period. Based on past experience with even less rainfall than that, I was expecting to lose them all, and we did not, so I feel pretty lucky. It probably helped that the whole onion bed got 2" of compost added to it this year which must have helped improve the drainage enough that most of the onions did survive. The ones that rotted mostly were at the lower end of the long, sloping onion bed and that end still needs a lot more improvement in how it drains, as this May's rainfall made evident.

I harvested oodles of tomatoes this morning and then I replanted the former potato bed, filling it with dahlias, oriental lilies, Cora vinca, lantana, and herbs that all had been sitting in containers for far too long waiting for the garden lake to dry up. By putting all of them in the empty raised bed that had held half the potato crop, I have them high and dry in case the weather brings us a flood, and that bed is lined with hardware cloth to keep the voles out because the voles here do seem to have an appetite for dahlias and lilies.

I've got a house full of plums and tomatoes,the mid-season corn, beans, squash, the 3rd onion harvest (of 5 varieties planted) and cabbage so I can do a lot of canning, freezing, fermenting and dehydrating this week....so it can rain all it wants and I'll still be busy with garden produce.

I haven't even planted a lot of the hot season stuff like okra and southern peas yet because we got so hot so fast after the rain stopped in May that it was killing my desire to be out working in the garden all day. If we are wetter and cooler this week, I might be out there in between rain storms sowing seeds. I do have melons planted, and still need to plant seeds of winter squash.

Robert, I went right out there to the garden to dig the last few potatoes and got distracted by picking tomatoes and putting all the flowers and herbs in the now-empty first potato bed that I forgot to dig the last little bit of potatoes. Then it got hot, and I thought that I'd come inside and cool off and go back out after dinner tonight and dig them up. Maybe tomorrow I can plant the rest of my flowers, herbs and ornamental peppers in the second potato bed tomorrow if I get all those potatoes dug today.

I hope you're able to get a few things done before the rain gets here. For our sake, I hope the rain doesn't make it to us too quickly. I'd love to have a whole day to work outdoors tomorrow.

Have any of you ever seen how cranky snakes get when flooding sends them to higher ground? Our neighborhood is full of cranky snakes that are much more aggressive than usual. I wonder if it is a territorial thing where they are jockeying for a new place to live/eat until all the river water recedes from the flooded bottomlands (and now the Red River is back in flood stage here, so I expect the snakes won't be happy for a while). Some folks here have reported snakes (specifically copperheads) aggressively charging towards them, which is unusual. Normally the copperheads will pull pack and avoid us if they can, but they are a little more rowdy right now. Yesterday a snake wrapped itself around the triangular pole that one of the purple martin houses is mounted on and was trying to get to the birdsor eggs in the house. Did you know that you can use a long pruning pole to pull a snake down off a purple martin pole high in the air? Tim did it without harming the non-venomous snake (looked like a fairly young chicken snake) and the snake then went slithering off into the neighbor's pasture, which presumably is where it came from to begin with. We've never even seen a snake try to get into a purple martin house before, and we've had the houses forever. I hope that snake was not telling us to expect flooding 12-15' high.

One more thing....if this tropical system in the Gulf of Mexico peters out and doesn't drop a ton of rain on TX and OK, that would be great, but I doubt we all will get that lucky. Somebody somewhere in this region probably is going to get more rain than they want or need. I wish it all could fall over Canton Lake in NW OK and fill it up.

Dawn

The latest model runs I've seen have shifted the track of the system slightly westward than it was previously, which would put it more over central OK than SE OK. They can flip-flop back and forth in later runs, though, so it could still change. Either way, we'll all likely get a bunch more rain.

Last model I saw said about 8" + for Durant area. Egads.

We now have Tropical Storm Bill. Everybody, get your mud boots ready.

I've linked a graphic from the NHC website. This particular graphic, at this time, shows the projected path. It certainly could change and probably will change, as Heather noted, but I think there's no doubt we're gonna be wet.

At the present time we have a trifecta in our county: Flood Warning, Flash Flood Watch and a Flood Advisory. As long as my garden is getting rained upon, I guess I'm happy. There will be time enough later to be unhappy if we get enough rain that the garden is floating away, and I'm not necessarily expecting that.

Tropical Storm Bill

Aaron Tuttle is suggesting that Norman could be in for some severe flooding. Paula, I think this week might be a good time to go on vacation somewhere it doesn't rain. :)

Oh Good Grief. We've been debating on whether to buy a tractor to repair some of the flood damage to our land....but I told Ken last night that I thought we should invest in a boat instead. How many potted tomatoes & peppers will fit in a bass boat? lol!

kfrinkle, The latest rainfall projections for your area sure haven' gotten any better, and my part of Love County is straddling the line that divides the projected rainfall into the 3-6" category and the 6-9" category. Looks like the frogs are gonna be really happy and the gardeners much less so.

Lisa, I imagine he is right. This year it seems like Norman floods at the drop of a hat. I imagine there will be lots of flash flooding and a lot of good old river flooding over the next few days. We had flash flooding overnight in part of our county (but not our part as most of that rain missed us too).

Paula, It needs to be a big boat so it will carry a lot of potted tomatoes and peppers.

All this rain has severely watered down the flavor of both tomatoes and plums. I suppose the tomatoes still taste better than grocery store tomatoes, but only just barely. Now that the peaches are breaking color and approaching the ripening stage, this big rainfall is going to come along and water down their flavor too. The rain hasn't hurt the quantity of produce we're harvesting but it sure has hurt the quality.

As soon as they do the weather here on the noon news, it is back to the kitchen for me because I'm making plum jelly today. I probably should be outside building a plant ark and loading it up with 2 plants of each kind....

This morning, I heard on my county radio that a small amount of water (at that point, 1" deep) had just begun flowing across the Lake Murray spillway at Scenic Hwy 77. Hopefully that runoff from last night's very heavy rains north of us won't cause enough water to flow over the spillway that they have to close down the road.

There's also a possibility that Lake Texoma may rise enough again to flow over the spillway again. The spillway is at 640 and the lake level currently is 637.70. It has taken it a couple of weeks to drop from the former high of 645.something and now it may go over the spillway for only the 5th time in its history. We weren't expecting the fifth time to occur so soon after the fourth time. We're expecting 3-6" in much of the area, with some areas getting 6-9". That much rain over a few days will fill up the lake quite a bit.

It is funny. I thought it was mid-June and we were in the process of recovering from all the May rainfall. Suddenly, we're almost right back where we started, as if the two weeks of drying out never even happened. I feel sorry for anyone near the lake or river and especially folks downstream as they are about to have water damage and destruction all over again.

On the bright side, all the rain made really nice-sized potatoes and lots of them which is wonderful since drought often causes smaller yields and smaller sized potatoes.

Dawn

Dawn, it sounds like your harvest is great for the circumstances that you have had. My potato harvest will not be good because we had no sunshine during the growing season. By the time we had sun, the vines were beginning to die back. I dug one row of Yukon Gold today and they look good but rather small. We have had less than an inch of rain in the last 7 days, but the ground was really too wet to be digging potatoes. I also have lots of things that didn't get planted, but hopefully I can still get some of them planted. I will put melons where the Yukon Gold potatoes were and maybe get some okra and squash planted. We have been eating a few green beans from the early row of bush beans, but my pole beans are starting to bloom and that is where I normally get my big crop. The few cucumbers that actually germinated with all of that rainfall are covered with blooms now, but I still need to re-plant. We picked our first few tomatoes this week, but this is the year that I really need to have new plants for Fall because I lost so many.

I have been pulling weeds and grass like a mad woman this week because they have been easy to pull. This is my poorest garden since I have lived here. They keep changing the projected rainfall for 'Bill', but it is likely to be 5-7 inches. If I still have a garden next week, I will plant a few seeds. LOL

Nearing 2" of rain here so far.

I did not get the rest of the potatoes dug before the rain came. Every time I would get ready another cloud would come by and rain a little.

I worked in the shop today and it was like a sauna in there.

My garden is pretty well stunted from the excess rain and continuous cloud cover last month. I guess the roots just didn't feel like growing in all the water logged ground.

Carol, Honestly, I am totally amazed that I have any garden left at all. Bill's headed this way to wipe it out, so I pulled the last of the onions today and laid them out on tables in the greenhouse to cure. I didn't think they could handle the 6-9" of additional rain forecast to fall here. I replaced the onions with watermelons and muskmelons but the rain may wreck that part of my plan too.

We have big, gigantic tomatoes that are absolutely bland and mealy and so watered down that they aren't much worth eating. So, just getting a harvest doesn't necessarily mean getting a worthwhile harvest. The best flavor is coming from the relatively small-sized tomatoes like Champion and Jaune Flammee', perhaps because the ones I just harvested this week were ripening during our 10-12 days of no rain that we enjoyed in between May's flood and this week's coming flood.

I'm sorry you're having the worst garden year ever. Maybe it will improve. I say that, though, knowing we have an El Nino occurring and that seems to be favoring continued rainfall. It is hard to hope against rain when we have been so short of it in recent years, but I am hoping it falls in lower quantities than forecast. There's already Bill-related trouble here in our county, and I expect it will just get a lot worse. I closed my garden gate this afternoon and stood and stared at it, trying to remember how good it looks right now, because I doubt it will look this good again this year if Bill brings the rain they're telling us to expect.

Of course, the minute Bill bids us adieu, we'll return to our usual 90-something degrees and high humidity, and the high heat index numbers will drive us all indoors. This is the worst year ever just for making it outdoors into the yard and garden and getting to stay there. If the rain, floods, mudding and skeeters aren't driving a person indoors, the high heat and humidity are.

Dawn