We had rain all day, here in Duncan, sometimes heavy rain. A little thunder and lightening. Normal, run of the mill thunderstorm at our location.

Other than flooding the garden for a few hours, nothing much to report. Rain quit a few hours before sundown, although it remained overcast.

Just a nice long gentle soaking here in glenpool. I'll check the gauge in the morning but I'm guessing close to an inch.

Mike

I bet we didn't have much rain, but we had tons of wind. That's probably not a good thing. However, I don't expect much if any damage to the garden. It rained hard, but only briefly. I'll have to check the rain gauges tomorrow. Our average rainfall in May is about 5.5". Before today, we had received only 0.04". I think wbonesteel is getting my rain in Duncan. : )

Things in parts of Texas are grim and it looks like my DH is going to work all night so he'll be there for all of it.

If anyone here has family in Johnson County, TX, multiple tornadoes and severe storms have done a lot of damage there. You may not be able to reach them as their power is out over a widespread area. A Tornado Watch remains active in much of the North Texas area until 1 a.m.

I am watching The Weather Channel and feel like most of OK got the good storms today...rain and not too much damage. Texas is getting the damage, and they really needed the rain....but not all the damage.

I know this is typical spring weather, but whatever happened to those lovely rainy days with just nice gentle rainfall and rainbows and frogs croaking in the pond? All we get anymore is wind and hail and some rain...and trees down and power lines down and gardens smashed. The weather seems more damaging than it used to be.

Dawn, we needed all we could handle. We haven't had any rain in Duncan, to speak of, for over a month, month and a half. Every previous storm ether bypassed us or went right over our heads and rained on someone else.

That said, I'll be glad for all of us when this drought breaks. Paying that water bill is startin' to hurt.

Nothing here south of Ft. smith. We had such wet cool spring that I could not get the garden in on time, now the ground is already starting to crack.

Larry

Dawn,

My family is safe and well this morning. Spoke with both sets of grandparents this morning and both were fine.

My paternal grandparents (Baize) didn't have any wind or hail and very little rain but were surprised to find out that a tornado briefly touched down less than three miles from their house. They had no idea.

My maternal grandparents (Herring) escaped unscathed as well and it didn't even rain at their house.

As for Granbury, the area hit was the area where, as I previously mentioned, I lived until August of last year. I cannot help but consider myself and my family fortunate as we would have, no doubt, been among the missing or injured. They are saying that, at this point, there were 100+ injured, 6 fatalities and 20 still missing. I will certainly mention those folks in my prayers.

Anyways, thanks to everyone for their well-wishes and prayers. They certainly helped last night. Now, I guess we can get ready for our turn at severe weather this weekend.

Reed

We got a good soaking rain west of Tahlequah and must've had some wind as one of my (too tall, needs to go) cilantro plants from last year was broken off this morning.

We must be getting all of you westerner's rain over here - seems every time we have a 20-30% chance of rain we get upwards of an inch. The puddles barely have time to soak in before the next wave hits around our place. There were flood warnings along the Illinois River this past weekend.

But...looks like we will have a nice stretch of days in the upper 70s/80s, so I'm expecting the garden to really take off in the next week or so!

Elaine

wbonesteel, I am thrilled y'all have had rain recently. I've just been wishing and hoping we'd get some too. We finally did last night during the tornado warning. I crept outside right before bedtime with the flashlight and checked the rain gauge and it had a half-inch. A little after midnight another thunderstorm hit. It was mostly thunder, lightning and wind for the longest time and then finally more rain fell. This morning there is a total of 0.95" in the rain gauge from yesterday and last night. The skies are darkening up and it is beginning to thunder, so maybe we are about to get a little more rain.

So, our month-to-date total at our house for May rainfall jumped from 0.04" to 0.99". That's a nice improvement.

I haven't watered any more than the bare minimum to keep everything a little happy. I've been holding out for the rain we should be getting at this time of year.

We have completed one new garden area out back (our original garden is in front between the house, which sits 300' back from our rural road, and the road) and another new area is in process. My goal with the two new areas is to be able to grow everything at once, instead of relying on constant succession planting. I get great results from constant succession planting, but the water bills in 2011 and 2012 were off-the-charts and I'd like to grow the same amount, but get it all to finish up by the end of July, more or less, so I don't have to water heavily all summer during drought.

This year most of the big garden out front is cool-season crops, and all those are clustered together. When they come out, if I think it is too dry to succession crop without extensive irrigation, I'll sow their areas with a cover crop and let it be. The portion of the big garden in warm-season crops is only about 30% of the total area, so at least I'll only have to irrigate that portion of the garden if the rainfall remains below the needed levels. The entire back garden is warm-season plants, so the majority of the irrigation needed will be done back there. I'm planning to lay out the drip irrigation lines this weekend, as soon as I get the last little bit of that area planted, which likely will occur today....or tomorrow if it rains all day today. I have a corner of that garden with Johnson grass regrowth and I need to hand-dig all those clumps out before I plant southern peas and sunflowers there.

The third garden area that still is under construction could have been completed this week, but we got sidetracked (willingly) by other tasks, mostly shopping for butterfly plants and putting them in. I had half-way made up my mind that I wouldn't even finish that 3rd area and plant anything there this spring if rain didn't start falling. Now that rain is falling, maybe we'll work on it next week. There's lots of storms in the weekend forecast, so maybe I should say we'll work on it if the weather allows. This 3rd area is mostly for several varieties of C. moschata winter squash and summer squash that need room to roam. I am trying two varieties of C. moschata avocado summer squash that are new to us this year, and then I have about a dozen rozelle plants to put in that area too, but they are still small and in the greenhouse.

Since the new garden area out back is new and I don't have any sort of image in my head of how it has to be or should be planted, I have been having fun with it. I don't have to stop and think, "okay, tomatoes were here last year....so this year they need to be moved over there...." That has left me free to just put stuff wherever I want, which is sort of liberating.

With the rain that fell in the last 24 hours, we are up to about 9.7" for this year at our house. That still is way below average, but it is better than the 8.7" we were stuck at for the last few weeks. I can remember good years here (2002, 2004, 2007 and a major portion of 2010) when I hardly had to water at all. The drought years have been tough ones. Our spring-fed pond no longer is spring fed and stays empty most of the year. Our overflow pond that catches the runoff from the big spring-fed pond, hasn't has any overflow water in it since 2009. Our spring-fed swamp in a different area no longer is swampy. Our big creek is empty most of the time, and our smaller creeks are empty all the time except during a rainstorm with heavy runoff. We used to have tons of little ponds, spring, pools of water, creeks, etc. all over our acreage, and now we don't. We're lucky though, because we aren't ranchers. Many ranchers around us have reduced their herds to almost nothing the last few years, and others have spent a lot of time and money putting in new stock tanks, hoping to be able to catch and hold enough water to get the cattle through the summer. When I look at all the challenges our ranching friends face in these recurring dry years, I stop whining about how dry my garden is.

Early in the year we had decent rainfall and I thought it might last, and I was so excited. Then it pretty much stopped. We had made it out of severe drought and back to moderate drought, but only stayed there about 2 or 3 weeks and then slipped back into severe drought. When you are in severe drought before summer even arrives, you know it will be a tough summer. I have been wishing for a nice wet year like 2007, minus the flooding, but I guess this isn't going to be that year.

I'm going to go find a year-to-date rainfall map and post it, and we can look at it and see how the state of Oklahoma is doing overall. I know some parts have had great rainfall but many others are still hurting.

One problem with early spring rainfall is that it causes a lot of plant growth. Then, when the rain stops, there is more fuel in grasslands and woodlands to feed the wildfires that have become increasingly common here in the summer months. It used to be our big wildfire season was winter when everything was dry and dormant, but in recent years, the summer wildfire season has been almost as bad. It is so dry here in our county that green grass has been burning, which freaks out a lot of people because they think green grass doesn't burn. Here in OK when the grassfires and wildfires start up, everything can burn....and that is what I'd hope we can avoid this summer.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Rainfall Summary Maps

Not much rain...but lots of thunder this morning. It hardly seems fair (I am laughing as I type this) since the thunder doesn't really do the ground much good.

Reed, I am glad that everyone is okay. There were some scary storms down near your folks' area. I think I saw a video of the Hamilton tornado on Chris' phone last night. I was on the computer, and he was tracking storms via Twitter posts and keeping me up-to-date on the weather near my brother (near Cleburne) and cousins (near Tolar), who were not in the path of the tornadoes and severe weather, for which I am very grateful.

Maybe it is just as well your grandparents didn't know about the nearby tornado....my brother had one come over his house in Fort Worth a few years ago. It touched down less than a mile from his house...near the school where his kids were seeking shelter in the band hall. My mom lives about a mile north of him and she didn't know a tornado had hit near his house and had damaged the school until I called her. He stood in his yard and watched the rotation soar over his head...and then realized it was headed towards the school...and his kids. Had we still lived there, we would have been hustling our mom into the bathroom to seek shelter because we lived just a few houses up the road from my parents house. When we lived in Fort Worth, we only had one tornado that I remember and it was in the late 1970s or earliest 1980s. It went over our neighborhood in the air and touched down elsewhere, but we had massive damage from strong winds and baseball-sized hail. Since we moved here in 1999, Fort Worth has been hit several times. I tell my family that we moved to Oklahoma to escape the tornadoes in Fort Worth. lol (We laugh at that statement, but they grimace, because they've had more damaging weather there than we've had here and it should be the other way around.)

I haven't heard official numbers this morning but they now have accounted for some of the missing near Granbury. Tim worked all night and said when he got home this morning that the weather in the D-FW area didn't settle down until after 2 a.m.

On some of the video footage I've seen from Texas, there is a wide range of damage...everything from relatively minor damage like some tree damage and a bit of roof damage to areas where the homes were swept away completely and you're looking at bare concrete slabs. It looks like the Granbury area's worst damage is at the Rancho Brazos subdivision...including about 60 Habitat for Humanity homes damaged or destroyed. CBS 11 has chopper footage up that shows large areas of widespread damage. It is terrible that there have been deaths, but when you look at all the damage, it is amazing there were not a lot more.

I'll do what I can on Saturday to protect the garden from the forecasted severe weather expected Sunday. It could be a really bad day.

Elaine, Rain is good! It is unfortunate that too much rain is just as bad as too little. Sometimes in this state it seems like rain only comes in two amounts--too much and too little, and rarely is just the right amount needed.

It has gotten really dark here and is raining now, so the thunder isn't all we're getting this morning. I'm so excited to have the rain. The cracks in the ground here are so big that the snakes sometimes flee from me by going down those cracks in the ground. I rarely have cracks in the ground in the big garden because the clay there is very well amended, but we have cracks in the ground there now. Maybe the rain will help those cracks close up some.

Dawn

North of Tahlequah got a nice soaking rain. I didn't get to my rain gauge. But I suspect it was a little over 1/2."

George

We had lots of thunder & lightning & wind here in Tishomingo. The storm that rolled through around dark dumped so much rain so quickly that it flooded our yard! Our property slopes down from front to back & we had rivers running down both sides of our house. It was a little crazy. I went out this morning & removed some grass & other debris from the flowerbeds it swept over. But no major damage. It stormed on & off all night & most of this morning. It only stopped drizzling here about an hour ago. We got 2.08" so I'm doing a happy dance! We needed it badly.

Me & my hubby were both born & raised in DFW, so we have a lot of family down there. Luckily, most of them were out of harm's way. We're still waiting to hear from his estranged mother, who lives in a mobile home outside of Cleburne. It's never easy to get a hold of her, so I'm hoping that not being able to get through to her is because the cell towers are overloaded. I just hope she's okay, despite her complicated relationship with my hubby.

Glad to hear you're okay, Dawn. I thought of you for a minute when they showed the warning for Love County. Reed, glad your family is okay, too!

I'm glad to hear y'all are safe, and some folks got a decent amount of rainfall.

We were under a "severe thunderstorm" watch this evening - wind gusts over 40 knots, lots of thunder bumpers, but not a drop of rain.

On the positive side, several storms had mesocyclone sigs but we didn't have another tornado. One tornado in the neighborhood is one too many.

Take care and be safe!
Pam

This was about as scared as a tornado warning has made me since we moved here. While sitting in the storm cellar, I was monitoring emergency traffic on my fire department radio, so I could hear our county's Emergency Management Director describing the location of the tornadic-warned cell on the radar, and I could hear storm spotters (one stationed about a mile south of me and another a couple of miles north) talking about what they were seeing. When they all seemed to agree the storm cell would pass between Point A and Point B, I said to myself "Hey, wait a minute. That's where I am!" It wasn't time to panic because there was nothing on the ground, but the storm-warned cell already had produced funnel clouds and damage in Montague County across the river from us in Texas, and our worst weather usually comes at us from Montague County, so I certainly was taking it seriously. We had one other time when a very weak tornado crossed the Red River slightly to our north, and we had a storm spotter on the road a quarter-mile south of us, our son was spotting a mile s/w of our house and a storm chaser was literally in the road in front of our house. I figured I was safe with that one because the spotters and chasers were close to the house and not fleeing, so the storm wasn't "right there". Imagine how scary it is for people who cannot hear the spotters and chasers talking to therefore have less of an idea about where the storm actually is! On the other hand, when I hear one of our VFD's firefighters at the station saying "we have some funky clouds here", that can make your heart pound.

Luckily for me, P-Mac was watching the radar and texting me storm info too and keeping me calm. Then, the storm cell stayed in the sky over us and never touched down on the ground and eventually we were able to go back into the house. At least we got some rain out of it.

I spent the rest of the night tracking the Texas storms. They were horrific for those of you who weren't following the news today, with the one that hit Granbury being given a preliminary rating of EF-4 and one of the three that hit Cleburne being given a preliminary rating of EF-3. Cleburne had almost an hour's warning and I think that helped keep the injuries to a minimum. So far, all the fatalities were in the Granbury area. However, there is a huge amount of damaged homes in the Cleburne area.

I heard two different numbers this evening---one was that the NWS had confirmed 12 tornadoes total in Texas yesterday and the other number I heard was 13.

Last night's storms in Texas are a reminder to all of us that May is a tough month around here and we need to really watch our weather this weekend because tornadoes are a very real possibility in OK and surrounding states.

Faereybutterflye, If y'all have not been able to make contact with her, you can check with the Red Cross. They have an amazing ability to track down people after storms. I heard that there were lots of powers outages, phone lines down, and likely damage to cell towers. I'm not sure how fast all that got fixed today, and imagine it all isn't fixed yet.

Pam, I saw on WU that your part of the country could have some wicked weather. It must be spring, huh?

A while back I chased a lot of fire ants out of the greenhouse. I didn't know where they went, but at least they were not in the greenhouse. Last night, I found them.....there in the tornado shelter with me. At the top of my list for tomorrow is to spray the shelter with Medina orange oil. If I find mounds around the shelter, I'll treat them with an organic fire ant product that contains spinosad. If there is one place I don't want to share with fire ants, it is the tornado shelter.

When it all was said and done, we got 1.25" of rain here at our house which was great, but our OK Mesonet station got almost 3".....so I am trying not to feel too bummed out about them getting so much more than we got. On this week's drought monitor map, most of our county moved into the Extreme Drought category so maybe that 3" of rain will turn that back around.

Dawn