It's crazy that y'all are so wet. We are so dry in central Oklahoma that some of the cracks in the field are about an inch wide. Rarely a happy medium.

Another .6 during the night. So up to 3.2 total over the two days at my house and more possibly on the way. Then dry out for a few days. We didn't get the excessive rains they did just a few miles away. Hope before it is over everyone gets a good drink. Jay

Jay, Hooray for the rain. How happy are your plants going to be for the rest of the week? I'm glad you don't have the flooding there, and I hope the horses (and all over living creatures) are enjoying the break in the heat.

I also hope the cool weather and rainfall combine to give you lots of blooms and new fruitset on your tomato plants.

Jennifer, That's just typical of Oklahoma---feast or famine. You're having the kind of year that I usually have and you have my sympathy. Actually, we are having the same kind of year here, but we got widespread rainfall of 2-4" in our county the first week of July (which now seems so long ago, but I'm grateful we got it) which helped a lot. Without that rainfall, my garden would have been dead by mid-July. The cracks in the ground are still there, but they had gotten smaller after that rainfall---and now are enlarging again.

I think the only difference in your dry conditions and mine is that ours has been spread out over the course of the year with consistently below average rainfall in every month except January and July, but yours has been more of a sudden flash drought over the last 3 months or so. Flash droughts can look deceptive on paper because your year-to-date rainfall will look sort of normal if you had good rainfall before the flash drought began, but your rainfall for the flash drought period will look horrible....and so will the ground and the plants.

If you look at the 90-day rainfall map, you can see how horribly many parts of central OK have suffered. This map shows the rainfall deficit for the last 90 days (or, for a few areas, the rainfall surplus):

90-Day Rainfall Deficit/Surplus In Inches

But then, if you look at the Year-To-Date Rainfall, you see the broader picture and it can trick a person into thinking that central OK's rainfall deficit for the year isn't that bad, which discounts the fact that what really matters is what is falling/has fallen lately:

Year-To-Date Rainfall Deficit/Surplus

Maybe this will be your week or our week for 'some' rainfall, though I doubt either of us will have anything like Jay's getting. Jay's area needs this---I remember some horrific drought years there where his annual rainfall was so low that the rainfall totals didn't even sound real. He would tell us what his rainfall had been so far for the year, and I'd tell Tim "how does anyone live there and garden there?" It delights me to picture rain falling, clouds, coolness in late July and even flash flooding (a little, not a lot---don't want enough to hurt anyone) up there because I picture that area being on the borderline between dry grassland and desert. I can honestly say that as much as we need rainfall, he always needs it so much more than we do, and is far less likely to get it.

I stopped watering most of my garden last week or the week before and a lot of plants are dead, nearly dead or well on the way to dying. They just had nothing at all, moisturewise, in the soil to sustain them once I stopped watering 2 or 3 times a week, especially with daytime highs over 100 degrees. I hope to spend tomorrow (when our fabled cooler weather really is supposed to arrive) yanking out all the tomato, squash and bean plants so I can start new stuff for fall.

Oh, and we got rain last night and had a rainbow. I noticed the rainbow slightly southeast of us first, and dragged Tim outside to see it shortly after we ate dinner. We looked at the rainbow (okay, it was the lower portion of one section of rainbow, so maybe 1/10th or 1/12th of a whole rainbow) and we marveled that somebody near us must be getting rain. Then we felt a raindrop hit us, and another one, and then a third one. It is what Jay calls an 4' rainfall---4' of distance in between raindrops. Then, it ended and the rainbow went away, but I know we had at least a dozen raindrops. But, who's counting, right? Nothing, not even a trace of rain, showed up in our rain gauge. I suspect the rain was more abundant higher in the atmosphere where we could see the rainbow but most of it was evaporating before it reached the ground.

The cracks in our ground that mostly closed up in early July aren't as bad as yours---I'd say most of them are no wider than 1/2" but unless we get some good rainfall, they can widen pretty quickly in the typical August heat. At least we get to start July without that heat.

Now, this map won't pick up Jay's rainfall since he is in extreme SW KS, but it will show what the parts of the OK panhandle have received near him:

Five-Day Rainfall Map

Jay, I hope more rain fell overnight and I hope you don't encounter flooded roadways while out working today. Enjoy your beautiful weather!

Dawn

Dawn one coworker got over 7" and flooding. I heard amounts this morning fom .2 to the 7+. A few in the 4-5 range.

The heat stress curl on the plants is gone on some and alot better on all. The leaves look like they are smiling now. The main issue I have left is the grasshoppers. Need to get some eco bran ordered. Hopefully things will green up snd give them more to eat on.

My Granddad always said nothing could make a day better than a new bull calf and a inch of rain. Got the bull calves last week and now rhe rain so this will be a great week and start to August