We got 3" yesterday, bringing our total for this year to 31". Not bad for us.

Dorothy, That's awesome! At the rate things are going, I'll be happy if we end up with 30" or 31" for the entire year. Our annual average is 38" or 39". Your annual average, of course, is a lot higher than ours.

Dawn

My friend Ron Cook has been keeping track at his home, which is only about 2 1/2 miles from me. This is what he wrote me yesterday.

"(We're up to 36.47" inches of rain, year to date for 2017 and it's only
June). Since we weathered a severe drought that lasted all Winter, a
little over 27" inches of that rain has fallen just within the past 90
days. To put that in perspective; we only had 30.21" total for the year
in 2016."

My gardens are doing wonderfully, especially since the main one sits on a rock (as in very large gravel) bed. But poor Ron, his garden is right along a normally dry creek bed. It's been washed out twice this year, the last time being June 17. On April 30th, I believe it washed so badly that he lost topsoil. He's beginning to wonder if he's going to manage an okra crop this year.

George, it really is amazing how Oklahomans manage to garden for anything with that wide of changes, especially larger scale farms.

George, Poor Ron. I cannot imagine him of all people not having an okra crop. That is mind blowing. I always expect flooding to follow drought, but that flooding rainfall can be as destructive as the drought...only in the opposite way.

Our creek is dry more often than not (apparently the creek's name is Dry Hollow Creek, though we lived here about 10 years before we even learned it had a real name), so I always wondered what would happen if we ever had a really rainy year. Then, in 2015, following our drought years of 2011-2014, we had almost 79" of rain (an obvious record here as it is about 200% of our average annual rainfall). Our creek got high and maybe out of the banks and into the woodland once or twice, but never even came close to our garden or any of our structures. I was so relieved!

The Red River was awful though, even carrying away a couple of old houses just a couple of miles NW of us. I kept worrying the river would sneak up on us from behind, but it didn't. It is hard to know what to expect when you are receiving unprecedented amounts of rainfall in a fairly compact time frame.

In May 2015, at our house we had a tiny bit over 24" for the month and that was sort of scary. Having survived that, I don't think Mother Nature ever will manage to flood us here in our creek hollow, but we did build on the highest elevation of our property in order to try to ensure we'd never flood. I probably never should say never because anything can happen. It seems like just about the time we think we have Oklahoma weather all figured out, it goes crazy and does something new.

Dawn