I really feel for the Panhandle folks. Their situation is so devastating. I am sure many of them have had to sell off their cattle herds just like the ranchers here did during the prolonged drought of 2005-2006. Their situation reminds me of a book by the great Texas western writer, Elmer Kelton, called THE TIME IT NEVER RAINED. The fictional work is set in Texas during a 7-year drought (which really did happen in Texas in the 1950s) and it is a story of a hard life in very hard times.

As for you and all your rain.....it is phenomenal and I wonder if you will ever see such outrageous amounts of rainfall again (after this current batch ends). Or, good heavens, what if the rainfall you're getting now is "the new normal"?

Our rainfall never matches the mesonet exactly, but I think the discrepancies even out over time.

I think the most rainfall we've had in one year since we moved here is about 34" or 36", and that was in a phenomenally wet year. Our driest year was 18" or 20". Most years we're in the upper 20s to lower 30s. Eighty inches in 14 months sounds like the rainfall some parts of Hawaii get.

Dawn

I had a sister that lived in Florida for awhile. She said it rains every night there, and that the water table is so high that if you dig a hole, it quickly fills with water.

Florida doesn't have anything on NE Oklahoma in the spring!

I sure hope this is not the new norm. With two springs in a row this way, and with global warming and all the other changes that are happening in the world, it is a scarey thought.

I have been inside so much I feel like I'm back at work. I'm doing too much cooking. And the MOSQUITOES!

I don't think I could handle living in Florida, although it is a MOST wonderful place to visit. Between their soil problems, the high water table, the pests that just won't quit (because there's little cold weather to knock their populations down), etc., it must be very hard to farm or garden there. And, of course, there is the ever-present threat of hurricanes.

I do have to agree with Ilene that northeastern Oklahoma is having some monsoon-like springs lately and it would be disheartening if, indeed, this is "the new normal" for those of you who live there.

And the MOSQUITOES! Oh, yes, and we all know that, in addition to making you miserable, that carry the very real threat of the West Nile virus.

I hope y'all get to dry out for a few days. Although, as much soil moisture as you've had, I guess it might take more than a few days to give you significantly drier conditions.

Dawn

Scott,

Your numbers made me curious, so I went to the Mesonet history pages and added up Love County's rainfall for the period April 2007 through June 2008 to see what we've had. Actually, it is a LOT for us because the first half of '07 was one of our rainiest periods ever. How much? 43.90".

Now, to equal your 80" of rainfall, though, we'd have to go backwards in time and add up every drop of rain received between Oct. 2005 and June 2008, and that would give us 81.10" of rainfall in 34 months.

By the way, the driest year since we moved to Love County was 2003 with only 18.91". I remember that year as an almost-perfect gardening year, though, because there was NO plant disease and not many pests. Of course, our waer bills were outrageous.

Our rainiest year was 2004 with 41.34", but 12" fell in June alone, so the overall year wasn't as wet as it sounds.

Since we've lived here, we've averaged 30.3" per year, which is significantly less, by several inches, than our area's 30-year-average. One thing I learned is that we often get our rainfall in great bunches, like 10" or 12" in a month, and then only 2" or 3" over the next 2 to 4 months. Our driest month is almost always January too.

Dawn

Anyone in the NE part of the state remember Labor Day 2005 through about Easter 2006 where we thought the entire area would burn. We got 8.6 inches in that 7+ month period; driest on record for many of us. I guess if you sum up the last 3 years we are about average.

It looks like the panhandle may have finally caught a break.

Oh, yeah.... That was the dryest summer that I could remember in a long time. It was a dry spring and we didn't get a drop of rain through the months that are normally hot and dry for us. My garden burned up, even though I watered. Fortunately for me, I wasn't trying to grow as many things... just tomatoes and beans... but I got absolutely nothing from the garden because whatever set onto the plants dried up and fell off. In a dry year, raised beds are a real problem. I just couldn't keep water in them at all.

I think that was the same year that Hulah Dam got so low. Hulah is not real deep, as reservoirs go, and all of a sudden someone called in to "Off The Cuff" (a service provided by our local newspaper where you can call in your comments and get them printed in the column) that Hulah was nearly dry. Well, then everybody got really alarmed and the city put us on water rationing and we couldn't water outside at all, or even wash our cars. A group of local churches sent people out to Hulah to pray for rain, and rain it did, right over Hulah and not hardly anywhere else! --Ilene

I remember that time period very, very well.

It is the only time I can remember that I just stopped watering the garden and said "I'm done!", and it was only the second week of June. I felt HORRIBLY GUILTY about it, but our water bill was already $300 a month and I was watering like a maniac trying to keep the foundation from cracking (it didn't) and the grass green enough to keep fire from getting too close to the house. Even after I stopped watering the garden, the water bill stayed high, but I thought it was better to have a high water bill than to spend thousands on foundation repair.

The fires were horrendous. Prior to that fire season, out little Volunteer Fire Department, which was about 2 years old at the time, had maybe 40 calls a year, and had just moved into our brand new fire station after spending the first two years operating out of a very kind person's metal shop building. For us, the fires started in late summer 2005 and ran almost all of 2006. I remember that for 2006, we had 240 calls.....most of them were raging wildfires. I cooked meals for our firefighters, sometimes feeding them 2 to 3 meals a day, and carried them coolers of water and Gatorade constantly. I absolutely disappeared from GardenWeb that year....was not on it at all.

I lost my daylily bed and blackberry bed because I couldn't keep them watered. Lost a lot of other plants as well. In the middle of all that craziness, we came home after a day of firefighting and the air conditioner had broken and our house stayed 85 degrees that night. We got it repaired in a day or so. AND, on a day we had 5 fires in our district and were out all day long....from about 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., our DS's best friend was in a fatal vehicle accident. It was the worst day ever.

Despite the heat, the lack of rain, the wildfires and the fact that I quit watering the veggie garden AT ALL, all the eggplant produced until frost, as did about 80% of the peppers and maybe 10 out of a hundred or so tomato plants. I was thrilled because I didn't expect anything to survive.

That year is why I always have 8 to 12 tomato plants in containers, because I want to have tomatoes if I ever have to stop watering the garden again. I am not sure I would ever completely stop watering again because it was just so distressing to feel like I gave in and let the weather defeat me. I mulch much heavier nowadays and use the soaker hoses more, and our water bill has never come close to being that high. In fact, it changed my watering philosophy and I water much less now. I think what I learned from that year is that the garden plants CAN survive on a lot less water than we think.

In 2005, we had 20.65" of rain, but almost half of that fell in July and August, which set up the wildfires. The almost 10" of rain we got in those two months caused LUSH growth of everything everywhere, but when the rain stopped, that lush growth turned almost instantly into tinder for fires, and by October/November 2005 we were out at wildfires daily. So, too much rain is not always a good thing. That's the only time our home has ever been "threatened" by wildfire, and we had 5 fires within about 1/3 mile of our house. I hope we never see a year like that again, but this is Oklahoma, so I bet we will.

Dawn