Got over 2 inches in Durant, my garden is horribly flooded out. It is in a sad state right now.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads, granddads, and anyone else who has filled a father-like role in a child's life.

At our house, we were lucky. Only a little over 1" so far, but of course after last week's rain, that 1" puddled and ponded and ran off. It surely did not sink in. Any progress we made on the drying up of the mud fro last week was just wiped out. Between our place and Marietta (heavier rainfall was in and east of Marietta), the bar ditches, creeks and even the hillsides were running like rivers. At our end of our street, it wasn't nearly as bad as it was even 2 miles due north, so it seems like we lucked out and got less rain than most others around here.

My garden is flooded, but not as bad as it has been in some other weeks. Earlier in the year, I had a river in my garden....now there's a garden sitting in the middle of my river. Which one is worse?

The rain killed Tim's Father's Day dream of spending the afternoon communicating with Mother Nature from the seat of his riding mower. I didn't step foot in the garden. While the rain didn't arrive here until after noon, we had thunder and clouds all morning long with very light misty sprinkles here and there so I was worried about the possibility of lightning.

In our county, we are approaching 50" of rainfall for the year. This is just ridiculous. If the second half of the year is not a whole lot drier than the first half, we may eventually float away.

At least a levee didn't break here (Cumberland Levee is busted and flooding near the Washita River) and a rural bridge didn't collapse (as it did in Hunt County, TX earlier today).

I don't know if they all are still in effect this late in the day, but we hit the Flood Trifecta again this afternoon: Flood Advisory, Flood Warning, Flash Flood Warning. 2015 is depressingly similar to the movie "Groundhog Day". Every day we wake up expecting something different and it is the same old same old rain and flooding once again. It's getting harder and harder to laugh about it.

stockergal, I'm glad y'all are making such good progress on recovering from all the tornado damage. I know it has been a long road, but now you're seeing tangible changes like the shop building going up and planning your fall tree planting. Step by step you're getting things whipped back into shape again. Yay!

I am just about beyond caring if the garden does anything else this summer. It will be a miracle if fungal and bacteria diseases, leaf molds and leaf rusts don't kill the whole thing.

Dawn

Yesterday I picked peaches from one of our trees. It was LOADED. But I had been too busy, and the rain hadn't permitted spraying for brown fungus. Only about 25% of the peaches are usable. Oh well. we got some and, I consoled myself, while picking, as I had to brush aside thousands of wheel bug nymphs.

George

Glad you were able to get a lil, George. How'd they taste? Watery?

Looks like everybody is rain free today, that's great. This wind and heat should help with fungal,bacteria,molds and so on. My daylillies are all opening up, I had no idea of the colors because they were all given to me by friends. They are all beautiful. My moonflowers and morning glories are growing like crazy,waiting for them to bloom. I had to move two of the morning glories, I tried to make them trail down my raised bed and they just kept turning back up, the idea looked good on paper but didnot work in the garden. I moved them to the front bed, I will just let them be ground cover.

Hope I get my big mower back soon, this pasture is getting out of hand. It seems to grow right behind you.

Macmex, hope your peaches are good. Never had watery tasting peaches?

George,

At least you got some of the fruit. In a year this wet, that's an achievement. Our peach trees are loaded as well but the fruit is still 1-2 days away from being ripe enough to begin harvesting it. Every day I squeeze a few fruit and say "1 or 2 more days", and this time I think we really are just 1-2 more days away. I haven't sprayed by fruit trees with any preventive fungicides, and haven't seen any rot yet, which is just amazing. I've been expecting to see brown rot break out all over the place any day now. So far, so good.

Stockergal, Peaches are affected by excessive rainfall or irrigation the same way tomatoes are----the excess moisture dilutes the flavor compounds. The plums ripened over a prolonged period of around 6 weeks and there was a lot of variation in their flavor---some were really watered-down in flavor and a few weren't. Overall, they weren't as good as usual for fresh eating, but made great jelly.

The tomatoes I've been picking aren't even worth eating, although the ones that ripened between around June 3-16 are better than the ones that ripened earlier or later. The flavor is so diluted that it is almost like eating a grocery store tomato. I'm hoping for better results from the peaches, but many plums had watered-down flavor too, so I'm not overly optimistic about that.

I went ahead and bought the store-bought ingredients I need to make Annie's Salsa with home-grown tomatoes and that's probably where most of the tomatoes will go. I will say the plants are heavily productive and have produced very large fruit, but the flavor and texture aren't up to par. At least I am getting tomatoes, and I am grateful for that.

No rain today (yay!) but we have a continual flood (pun intended) of media reports and law enforcement reports of additional bridge closures, road closures, washouts, sink holes, breaks in small dams, dikes or levees, etc. We now have a portion of a third highway closed in our county, and we don't have all that many highways. I hope this stops soon or we'll run out of alternate routs. (I-35 is fine, but the state highways have some issues in some places.) Still, the closures are much worse in the counties to our east and southeast and I feel sorry for all affected. Some folks are having to add an extra hour or two to their daily commute because the detour around closed bridges is such a great distance to travel.

I harvested early before it got too hot and now I am trying to figure out what to do with a bunch of tomatoes with very sub-par flavor other than using them to make a ton of salsa. I also weeded as I worked so at least the tomato rows in my garden look pretty good today. I'll try to work on weeding other areas tomorrow morning before it gets too hot. Tim mowed a bit of the yard this afternoon, so at least we can see the snakes before we step on them instead of afterward, and he caught the grass clippings when he mowed and dumped them in the garden pathways, so the paths that lost most of their mulch in the flooded rains now have a new layer of mulch.

Dawn

I am sorry that your garden produce is so negatively affected by the rain. I just assumed if it didnot drown it would be ok, I was so wrong. Summer just is not summer without a garden ripe tomato that will curl your toes. I could live on fried okra and sliced tomatoes!!! I guess you have to enjoy what nature lets us have, right. Are you going to try for a fall garden this year? When is it to late to plant for fall gardens?

The road situation will take a lot of time to fix. I hope they stop closing roads before you are left without any roads to use, and detours are so annoying.

I get my big mower back in the morning so you know what I will be doing for several hours tomorrow.

I understand about the mulch, I think I lost every inch of mine. I purchased several bags of shredded cedar, just have to find the time to get it back on the gardens.

Everything I have has been slammed together. While carelessly tying up the tomatoes I broke off branches. That was a few weeks ago. I simply stabbed the broken end of the branch in the dirt of the bed for fall plants. A couple have little tiny branches with new baby leaves growing atop. So cool.

All plants are bearing fruit but one, the Baker Family Heirloom that might be sitting on too much nitrogen. Not many fruit. They're all small. But all are growing like crazy and flowering out.

We're reaching low temperatures after midnight around the low 70s. I hope that's a good temp for them. I think the hugel bed could become prolific with tomatoes.

Spent the whole afternoon mowing. Can't just mow a little then everything else looks so,overgrown. Just need to trim up, I'll do that tomorrow. They are calling for rain and cooler weather Friday. Don't need the rain but I'll take the cool temps.

I know this is unrelated but, Has anyone seen the video of the mountain lion siting out side the patio doors trying to get the house cat that is sitting on the inside. It was taken in Colorado that cat has no clue he just stares at the mountain lion and the mountain lion can't figure out why he can't get the cat. I think I would have a run away if I walked through my living room and saw that lion sitting there. CRAZY!!!!!

I'll just leave you guys with that little story to think about.

I loved that video and laughed about it.

For people who know my history of cougars near my garden, it probably is hard to believe I could laugh at a cougar now, but it has been several years now, so I can laugh. I wouldn't be laughing if I saw that thing outside my door though. I'd be too concerned about the safety of our dogs, cats and free-range chickens.

I hear you. We had a cougar that used to roam the big creek that runs in front of the house. Never saw her but we would hear her scream every now and then. Have not heard her since the tornado. That scream was bad enough it was like a human scream. It was so strange just before she would scream the donkeys and the dogs would just freeze, then she would scream, then the dogs and donkeys would just go about thier business. you would think they would run for cover but they didn't, I alway thought that was so strange. Everything would happen in about 3 seconds, if you weren't looking at them you would never see them freeze. I was told by a man that relocated rare animals, that she was in heat when she screamed. I thought, great that means there is a male around here someplace.

We can laugh at the video it was in Colorado and someone else's house. Ha!!!

That's so true about the video. It is easy to enjoy it knowing that it wasn't from anywhere around here.

I heard the screams from a long ways off (probably down along the river) for 2 or 3 years before I heard one up close, and it truly is the most horrifying sound I've ever heard in my life.

Let's hope she had to scream a lot and never found a male in your neighborhood (or mine). And, if a tornado wouldn't scare one off, then what would?

Tim and I decided to drive down and check out a couple of our favorite river roads yesterday to see how much water they'd been under. Some of what we saw, in terms of mud residue left on trees and such quite a distance from the river, was horrifying. I just cannot imagine water got that close to homes (most of which, thankfully, were not that far away distance-wise but were up on a higher ridge). We didn't get to drive around as much as we wanted because the roads were one or more of the following: closed off (and we do not drive around barricades), still under water, washed out in low spots or covered with so much mud and debris that they look washed out, or still under water, still under water, still underwater. It is scary to see that much water still on roadways that far from the river even after it officially has dropped below flood stage. While our Flood Warning for the Red River bridge is gone, much floodwater remains in the flood plains areas.

Now that it is so hot outside, my gardening ambitions have been whittled down to harvesting, eating the harvest, and processing the harvest to put up a significant part of it for future meals. Tim mowed like a maniac yesterday, cutting down everything his wife would allow. Ha ha! I didn't want for him to cut down the front meadow that sits between the roadway and the house. I regularly put out a little henscratch and cracked corn there for the doves and other birds, and our young wild turkeys are coming to that spot to eat. I wanted him to leave that area tall so they'd have good cover.....and also because it is filled with wildflowers from a seed mix I sowed back in the winter. With so many mostly drought years recently and poor wildflower showings in those years, I'm loving having a rainy year with tons of wildflowers. While he mowed out there in the heat, I was inside running tomatoes through the tomato strainer to prep them for salsa-making. As I did it, I bagged up the finished tomato product in gallon zip-lock bags, with enough in each bag for one batch of Annie's Salsa. Then I fed all the tomato waste to the compost pile. I have enough tomatoes prepped for nine batches of salsa, so that's how I'll be spending the rest of today.

After the cold front comes through and we have some cooler temperatures this weekend, I'll try to catch up on weeding the garden and harvesting other stuff. I might run outside in a couple of minutes and harvest the peaches that are ripe. We're getting about a dozen a day and mostly have been eating them, but they are starting to pile up so I can see that some peach processing is in my future. Probably I'll slice and freeze the freestone peaches and will boil down the cling type peaches and make jelly from them.

I'd rather be out in the garden if the heat and humidity weren't so bad, but since they are so unpleasant, I guess it is just as well that I have a lot of tomatoes to process. Well, I think they are tomatoes. They are beautiful and big and look like tomatoes. They are the shape of tomatoes. They grew on tomato plants. But, are they tomatoes? Their flavor is so watered-down that 95% of them aren't worth eating fresh (the only really tasty ones are the ones I harvested in early June in between the big May rainfall and the big June rainfall), and their texture also is sort of mealy thanks to the ridiculous amount of rain that has fallen here in such a short period of time. I really devoted time to draining off as much of the excess water as I could while processing them for salsa yesterday. I think that the salsa will be fine, but I'll taste the first batch carefully before I make the next 8. It would be such a waste to make all that salsa and have it taste bland, but I don't think that will happen. There are things I could do to fix the flavor if the salsa doesn't taste right due to the watery nature of this year's tomatoes.

After doing the amount of processing required to end up with 72 cups of chopped and drained tomatoes for salsa-making, my kitchen had red splotches everywhere....it looked like a slaughterhouse in there. My family and our pets are pretty well-trained to stay out of the kitchen while I'm canning and doing canning prep, so I was able to get all the mess cleaned up before they came in there and started asking questions about what I was killing in there. : )

I've got enough tomatoes piled up on the shelves but not quite ripe to make another 3 or 4 batches of salsa, so I suspect that I'll be spending a portion of every day for the rest of the week making salsa. Today, I'll probably spend most of the day and late into the evening doing just that.

Sounds like you have a lot work behind and in front of you. I hope we cool off a little this weekend so we can get caught up on all of the out side chores.

I know it is shocking to see how high flood water can get. I think it might be to much to see it when it is happening. Somethings are best seen after not during.

It looks like you guys are getting a good shower. We missed the rain, but could have used a drink. I am waiting for the cooler weather to come in, need a heat break!!!

It was a really nice little shower, hitting in several rounds, but with no excessive rainfall. At our house we ended up with a half-inch of rain. It was just enough rain to cool the air----we quickly dropped from 94 degrees to 77 degrees and then stayed there for a couple of hours before it eventually warmed back up to 79. I was in the kitchen making salsa so didn't get to really enjoy the rain, but I went out and stood on the porch for a minute while a batch was in the canner and just enjoyed watching the billion frogs hopping around in light rainfall.

One disadvantage to living in a small, rural community is that you don't hear the news often enough----our newspaper is a weekly and the local TV covers all the really big stuff, but not the smaller things so well. When this week's paper arrived yesterday with a lot of flood coverage from the flood damage from the previous week (the night Ardmore flooded so badly), I learned that the Falconhead community even had their airport flooded with up to 5' of water and mud inside airplanes inside the hangers, and their landing strip and golf course flooded heavily as well. A few homes were damaged, one quite badly with floodwater just short of reaching the eaves of the house. The folks who live in it awoke in the middle of night to find water rising and had to flee quite quickly. A family that runs a local catfish restaurant lost a couple of homes to the flooding, despite a valiant effort to hold back the water and save those homes. Those kinds of stories are heartbreaking, but then there's also stories about all the good people who rallied to help folks in trouble----including a local gentleman who used his air boat to ferry paramedics to a medical call in an area where flood water had made the roads impassable. As I was reading the newspaper, I was just stunned at the way there's pockets of damage everywhere---some of it I did expect, while in other areas, it was shocking how high the water rose. I have absolutely no complaints about what the rain has done to us here----our yard and garden have been a mess at times, but our buildings and vehicles have remained dry and unflooded----and we are counting our blesssings as many others have not been so lucky.

As bad as I think that my garden looks, it has been productive overall and many folks just have abandoned their gardens (and I don't blame them), feeling like there was no point in trying to fight the wet soil and diseases any more. One our our friends finally got his garden planted, better late than never, you know.....and then a new torrent of rainfall and flooding in June wiped it out. I'd be in the same boat if we hadn't invested years of time and expense in building raised beds. I did notice yesterday that some folks managed to get in another cutting of hay this week. I'm not sure how they did it. I guess the heat dried out the pastures and fields enough that they managed to cut and bale in the few days where we didn't have rain. Unfortunately, the folks who lease flood plain land for haying or grazing aren't getting to use that land this year but then again, they know the inherent risk of leasing the flood plains.

I don't even know what is worse at this point---to keep having continued rainfall---or to roast in the heat and humidity without it. We'll just try to roll with the punches and keeping harvesting from the garden whatever we can, but I'm not inclined to try to plant much for fall yet. While the top inch or two of soil dries out really quickly in the heat, there's lots of moisture down deeper and that sort of really wet soil combined with summer heat is a bad combination for trying to get seeds to sprout. This will be remembered as the year that too many seeds rotted without even sprouting.

We didn't get a drop of rain here. The temps didn't drop till dark. I was hoping for about 1/2" for the yard, I am realy dreading rolling out,the hoses but I think I might this week. We are cutting the Bermuda grass hay today it will probably bale Monday evening. I mowed all morning it was nice and cool, problem is I just mowed everything Tuesday (4 days).

There are so many perinnals going on sale now, but the heat will kill anything you plant. All I have are full sun beds right now. I plan on building some shade beds this winter. If I had a spot,to put new plants that had afternoon shade I would be buying everything on sale.

I used to have a bed , I called it my ICU bed, that I would put all late season buys in and then just transplant in the spring. It would get sun till about noon then shade the rest of the day. If I look hard enough I might find a good place for an ICU bed, problem is I don't have enough buildings to use as shade. I thought about putting the sale plants in large pots and transplant early fall. What do you guys think? Or can I just leave them in the nursery pots, might get root bound.The pots will be in plenty of shade/sun as needed.

Like you said Dawn, we went from cool to hot and missed a whole month of planting. In oklahoma if you miss thirty days you miss your window. Well I guess next year will bring a new set of problems/surprises.

That's great that you got the bermuda cut and baled. That's quite an accomplishment in the kind of weather that has plagued us for months. I'm getting worried that now that it is getting so hot, the rain will abandon us and we'll be roasting hot for the next 2 or 3 months.

I think you could do that with the plants. In large pots with adequate moisture they should hold just fine until fall.

If you think they need shade, you could put a shade cloth above them. I have a 40% shade cloth that is about 6' wide by 50' long that I put over happy, healthy tomato plants (I don't bother doing this with crappy, diseased ones since they aren't worth the effort) when it gets really hot in July. We make tall hoops of PVC pipe and suspend the shade cloth so there is at least one foot of air space between the shade cloth and the top of the plants. Shade cloth can get pretty pricey. I bought my roll at Sam's about a decade ago and also have used it to shade peppers in really hot, dry summers----mostly to prevent sunscald of the peppers when the plants are heavily loaded. In the absence of shade cloth, you could use any textile that breathes---a bed sheet, burlap, floating row cover, etc. as long as you leave an air space so the plants don't roast beneath the fabric.

I've been trying to not look at any plants in any stores. After the harvesting was done, I filled my potato beds with dahlias and oriental lilies I had started in pots and kept in the greenhouse while it was raining. Then I filled in the space around them with herbs and Cora (disease-tolerant) periwinkles. Then it rained 8", with over 6" of that in one day. The dahlias look fine, the disease-tolerant periwinkles look very sick, the herbs (rosemary, sage and pineapple sage) look pretty good and the gardener looks very irritated. I went back and replaced the worst-looking periwinkles with ornamental peppers I had raised from seed. I'm not sure it was worth my time to plant all those things in early to mid-June, but we really weren't expecting that sort of rain when I planted. (sigh) My plant troubles are minor compared to folks who've lost their homes here, or had their airplanes flooded inside the hanger and the airstrip flooded out with the airstrip a pile of rubble.....but it just figures that the minute I tried to fill in a bare bed, the rain would return with a vengeance. I still haven't planted anything where the early or mid-season corn, beans or cabbage grew and I don't think I will. There doesn't seem to be much point.

A friend of mine told me earlier in the week "you're the only fool I've seen out in their garden this week". That's me---the gardening fool. We only need about 11" more rain in 2015 and we'll set an all-time record. It is not a record we are hoping to set.