Ah...great minds :) When the storms abated a bit this morning (around 6:00) I checked my rain gauge...2 3/4"...I'm at work now, but when I left at 6:30 it was really starting to pour again, so I'm sure I'll end up well past 3" by the time it's all through.

I was tempted to run the hose yesterday...and held off. I also held off cutting the grass and wish I hadn't!

Sharon

I just emptied the rain gauge 2.75 inches.

Moni, I watered all day yesterday too!!! I knew there was a chance of rain, but when I went to bed it sure did not look like it was headed our way. Oh, well, it caught all the areas I didn't get to. I'm sure glad I planted those last couple of pentas last night instead of waiting.

Sharon, how interesting that it looks like you got more than me and we are so close!

Lisa

Well, Lisa...

My 2 3/4 matches your 2.75, ya know :)

I am officially jealous of all who are sleeping in/lounging around in their jammies this morning...what a great morning for it!

Sharon

Sharon, want to trade? I came in for a break. Cleaning out guttering. Not only where there leaves to clean out near the downspouts, but there is a 1/4 to 1/2 inch gunk in the guttering all around the house.

Not what I was planning on doing today.....

Moni

Wasn't it nice to have that rain, though? I think I got about the same as Lisa. Let's see - that would be two and three quarters, right? LOL!

I bet the garden loved it, and I will be going out to check things here in a sec.

I got up at 6 a.m. and went out to the porch to revel in the cool temps and the brilliantly lit sky. Heaven.....

Lisa, I still have plants for you whenever you want to get them, however you want to get them.

Now to check the garden...........

Susan

Okay Sharon!!!! There was a time difference there....I checked mine after all the rain stopped!!! :) You were expecting more than 3 inches. lol.

Susan, I'm going to get out and about today. I'll try to get over there. Thank you!!!

Lisa

Nothing, nada, zilch.

We had wind and thunder around 4 a.m. and maybe a few raindrops but not enough to even register as a trace.

It is hot and dry here and my big pond is now a small pond. I believe Love County's drought has begun because the rain keeps missing us here lately and once that starts, it seldom changes for months.

I'm so happy y'all got rain, but wish we'd had a couple of inches too.

Dawn

2.4" of rain and LOTS of tiny hail - around 10:45 and again about 3:30 this morning - the trees, gardens, and flowerbeds look like someone went thru them with giant weedeaters. Most of the green beans, squash, cucumbers, and peppers look really bad - don't think the beans will come back out. The tomatoes are broken and badly bruised, but hoping they will recover in time - picked off the green ones as they were bruised and busted. Just thankful the hail wasn't larger........and we needed the rain.

We live in SE Edmond and we had an absolute downpour along with some hail. Rain gauge said 5 inches and I'm not surprised. A lot of the mulch I put down yesterday was washed out, so looks like I'll be doing that again today.

Also, the tops of several Sungold plants were ripped off and about a third of the stems on my zucchini plant(hadn't set any fruit) were broken. Sungolds I think will be fine since they were 3-4 ft tall, but I'm not quite sure what to do with the broken stems zucchini plant other than to cut them off and hope the critters don't make a home in the hollow stems. I think I'll plant a few more zucchini seeds just to be safe.

Good grief, the weather we have in OK is unbelievable. In fact, I just saw the forecast for this weekend, and they are predicting high 90's this weekend...I guess summer is here.

LOL...sorry, Lisa - just had to give you a hard time.

Wow...hail? 5" of rain? And then Dawn gets nothing...hard to believe and yet...not so hard to believe, this year especially!

I'm sorry for all who have (yet again) had damage to their gardens, for whatever reason. It's hard enough doing the right thing consistently, without having to battle the weather, too.

And yes...I noticed how HOT it's supposed to get this weekend. I'm SO looking forward to Katie and Greg's outdoor wedding Sunday at 2:00 :)
Thank goodness the reception is indoors...air-conditioned indoors!

Sharon

I am so jealous! We could use a nice soaking down here. Hot & dry, no end in sight... Please send some this way to water in my newly-planted veggies!

Diane

Farmgardener, So sorry to hear about the hail damage. Hail is just the worst...you cannot do anything in advance to protect your plants from it. I think most everything will recover but agree with you that the beans might not. Having said that, though, I have had about 50% come back from being demolished by golf-ball-sized hail in the past, so never say never.

Pedmond, Five inches is a lot...really too much to get at one time, but what can you do?

I try to keep SVBs out of stems by covering the stems with portions of pantyhose legs/feet. Just tie a section closed at the top and pull it down over the stem. Then I use a rubber band to hold it close to the stem. Both the rubber band and stocking expand as the squash plants grow and they will help exclude SVBs from the open, damaged stems.

Here in Love County, we've already hit 96 (yesterday), which is hot for May and will be about the same tomorrow, although today was a relatively cool 92 or 93. If it is going to be hotter this coming weekend, I don't want to know about it! I was thinking yesterday that life is so unfair....May is usually our last really 'good' month for pleasant gardening before the June heat arrives in mid-June and ruins everything...and this year we've had June temps in May. I hope that doesn't mean we'll have July temps in June. I feel like it it going to be a miserable summer.

Sharon, You know, we've only been here a dozen years, but I watch the weather closely and can almost always know in April/May if it will be a hot, droughtlike summer, and I've believed for at least 6 weeks now that it will be one here in southern OK. Our weather pattern prior to April was lovely with regular rainshowers and all that. Since then the rain has been much more sporadic and seems to come very close to us and then go east or west or north or south. It reminds me very much of some previous drought years where we joked about being in the 'doughnut hole' where the doughnut gets rain all around us, but we're in the hole and it misses us. I guess that happened last night because when we drove through Thackerville this morning, they had huge standing puddles of water everywhere. I guess the rain missed us but hit them.

I can't believe it is wedding time. How perfectly exciting and wonderful. : ) I hope the weather is perfect....I already know the bride will be beautiful and her mama will be smiling and crying all at the same time. Lucky you...you'll be gaining a son-in-law! Please tell Katie I'll be thinking of her on her special day.

Diane, Guess you and I both will be singing the "we ain't got no rain" blues for a while. (sigh) I can't say it is a surprise....last year was the wettest year we've had since moving here. I knew we wouldn't luck out and have two rainy summers in a row, but I still wasn't really prepared for the rain to just stop falling and to keep going around us.

That old cracking clay soil annoys me every time I look at it....and I know that you know what I'm talking about.

Dawn

We had just enough sprinkles, at sunrise, to get ones shoes wet. But no accumulation.

George
Tahlequah, OK

Dawn, thanks for help with the broken zucchini stems. I'll see if my wife has an old pair I could use. I went ahead and planted a few more seeds, so maybe I'll be giving away zucchini in a few months.

By the way, I just saw the forecast on the weather channel, they are now predicting 101 on Friday and 104 Saturday. I'm afraid we're in for a long hot summer now that El Nino is starting to subside.

Phil

We got between 5-6 inches ... Had to ask the neighbor because mine only goes to 4 :) (Around the Choctaw/ Harrah area) We were camping in a pop-up camper thank goodness there wasnt any large hail! Came home today and it looks like a river went through the middle of the garden will need to get more straw tomorrow.

Regarding the zucchini and hail: My first veggie garden was hit with a little bit smaller than dime size hail (this will be my 3rd this year) The zucchini looked like swiss cheese but they bounced back and I didnÂt lose one plant. I planted 8 my first year thinking something (me) would kill them but they ALL survived. I got to give a lot away.
Heather

5+ inches here in Bowlegs; my gauge only goes to 5 inches with maybe an 1/8 inch extra & it was full to the brim. If I count what was standing in the formerly empty buckets and pans out in the yard, I'd say 5 and 1/2 inches.

Just a good soaking rain, lots of lightning and thunder, but no hail.

I wish we had a rain gauge (will have to get one). I know we must have had well over 2 inches because our yard had been drying nicely from the last go-round and now all the low-lying areas are full of water again. We had hail too, some as large as ping-pong balls but most of it was smaller. A few large stems were broken on the tomato plants and most of them lost leaves and a few small green tomatoes, but overall they came through it better than I expected.

Sharon, our son and DIL were married in an outdoor wedding on May 20 four years ago and it was 100 degrees at 6 in the evening when the wedding took place. Most of the guests were in a shaded area but the bridal party was standing in full sun. We worried whether everyone would make it okay, especially one of the bride's attendants who was pregnant, but thankfully they all were fine. It did make for a memorable wedding though :). I hope everything is wonderful for your daughter's wedding Sunday.

Suzie

Phil, You're welcome. We gardeners here in Oklahoma have to use every trick in the book to keep those Squash Vine Borer grubs out of our squash plants. I always succession plant squash because there's no way that the SVBs won't find my plants and kill them.

Oh, wow, y'all are going to be hotter than us this weekend. We're looking at about 97-100 on Thursday through Sunday. I have been watching El Nino's demise so very closely for months as well as the quick initiation of La Nina, and it has been so depressing. I was hoping we'd have several months of neutral conditions in between the demise of El Nino and the start-up of La Nina. Instead, we went almost immediately from El Nino into La Nina, which is a worst possible case scenario for gardeners here since La Nina tends to bring heat/drought (at least it does in my part of the state).

I'll tell you the analog year that I am expecting this summer to resemble, but I'm just basing this on a gut feeling and the general resemblance between the April/May weather here that year and this year.....and that year would be 2005. Maybe also 2003. Both were horribly hot and dry. I hope I'm wrong, Phil, but I think La Nina is going to just eat our lunch this year.

Heather, You are very fortunate that the Squash Vine Borers didn't find your zucchini plants. Here, they arrive early and stay late and cause problems all summer long. In the rare years when the SVBs don't get our zukes, I shred and freeze it and can use it all year long for zucchini cake or zucchini-chocolate chip cookies or in other recipes.

Y'all sure did get a lot of rain there, and I am insanely jealous. I think our big pond, which is about 1/3 acre when completely full, will go dry in the next 10 days or so. Usually in a drought year it doesn't dry up until August, but the rain is going out of its way to avoid us this year.

Littledog, So....you had more rain in one day than we've had all month long. Lucky you. We'll be very lucky if our June, July and August rainfall adds up to 5" total, unless a tropical storm's remnants come up across Texas and hit us and dump heavy rainfall, and that only happens once or twice a decade.

Suzie, That certainly was some good-sized hail. The only good thing about the rain missing us was that the hail and flash flooding missed us too.

The downside to the rain that all of y'all received is that heavy rainfall plus heat often leads to all sorts of fungal diseases and some bacterial ones on tomatoes (and other diseases on other crops too). I hope that doesn't happen to y'all, but here in my garden, heavy May/June rainfall seems to fire up Early Blight and Septoria Leaf Spot almost overnight, so all you lucky folks who received rainfall need to watch closely for disease development from this point forward.

Dawn

I've been dealing with a respiratory infection for the past week and a half so I took it easy and didn't do much yesterday, including getting on the computer.

When I emptied my rain gauge yesterday morning it had 3" in it. I had just finished getting all the veggies planted Saturday and Sunday and watering them good. I don't think I got hail, but some flowers and two tomatoes did get beaten enough to be droopy and stuck in the mud. Nothing broken though, and they all perked up fine by afternoon.

Debra

2.75 inches and lots of small hail in East Edmond near I35. Flattened 8 tomato plants and broke tops off of 6 of those. One pepper plant broke stem about four inches above ground. Going to leave them in the ground after giving additional support as a broken stem by cat Carbon plant has recovered. Love OK weather.

Dawn, I really appreciate the tip about covering the broken Zucchini stems with hose. I got them covered up last night so that will at least keep the critters from crawling down the holes in the broken stems. Now, like everyone, I just wish we could get some "normal" temps so the tomatoes will keep setting fruit for a few more weeks.

Phil, I hope it works. Some years wrapping the stems from the time they're planted seems to at least keep the SVBs out for a long time, and some times it doesn't. Maybe it will help your damaged plants repel the SVBs for a while.

Like everyone else, I'm hoping the weather doesn't shut down production too long, but it will shut it down. After a relatively mild day here Thursday, my forecast is for daytime highs and nighttime lows that are 10-15 degrees higher than our usual temps for early June. That's just awful. Still, somewhat more normal temps will return next week. We'll just have to hope the flowers are pollinating and fertilizing on the cooler days

I've toyed with the idea of putting up shadecloth over the plants this summer like some of the folks in Texas and Florida do during the hottest part of the summer. If the heat persists, I'll probably try if over one of the big beds that has 20 or 30 tomato plants in it and see how they perform compared to the unshaded plants. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Dawn