Hank, I do remember the heat wave of 1980 although I was living in Texas at the time. It was the worst summer ever and I know that I will never forget it. I was in college and working full-time, and I had a car with NO air conditioner. (That was the absolute last car I ever bought without an air conditioner!) My dad had a garden that year, as always, and all I remember about it is that he had a HUGE crop of the biggest, tastiest tomatoes we'd ever produced until the red spider mites got the plants in early August. In Fort Worth we went 69 days between June 23 and September 6 with high temperatures over 100 degrees, a record which stands to this day. We also recorded the all-time highest temperature ever officially recorded in the D-FW area on June 26 and June 27---113 degrees. That same year the second highest temperature ever recorded in Texas was recorded in Wichita Falls--119 degrees. In Oklahoma City, y'all had 50 days of triple digit high temperatures and recorded OKC's all-time high temp of 110 degrees--the hottest day on record outside of the Dust Bowl days. The Heat Wave of June-Sept. 1980 did an estimated $20 billion in damages/costs to agriculture and related industries. In addition, an estimated 10,000 deaths during that time-frame were classified as heat-related deaths including those caused by heat-related stress. I worked for an international airline and I remember that people would walk off the air-conditioned aircraft into the UNAIRCONDITIONED jetways, which were said to be in excess of 140 degrees, and they would collapse right there in the jetway. It happened over and over again. We sure kept the police officers, paramedics and firefighters busy that summer with all the medical calls. I also remember that you just couldn't seem to cool off, no matter what you did, because the nights were so incredibly warm too. I have been thinking along the same lines as you that we ought to have good gardening weather next year. For as long as I can remember, we have often had several hot and dry years in a row, but I don't ever remember having two excessively wet years in a row.....well, maybe in the late 1960s, but I was a kid then, so am not sure the memory is accurate. Dawn

Jo, So, next to gardening, your other hobby is spending money? Heaven help your bank account if it rains for another week. : ) Lynn, I wish the rain would leave y'all alone for a while! Too much of a good thing is still too much. I hope your soil gets a chance to dry out soon. Paula, I was watching footage of the OKC flooding on The Weather Channel last night. What is is with the weather and central Oklahoma this year? It seems like the weather just won't give central OK a break this year, although at least the temperatures are a bit cooler even as the water floods people right out of their homes. We did get rain FINALLY, but not as much as they got at our Mesonet station in Burneyville. I think Burneyville was showing 1.37" at one point and we'd only had 1/10th of an inch. It was getting depressing. The heavier rain finally arrived late in the day, and now we're up to 2.3" in the last 24 hours. That's pretty much our average July monthly rainfall in one day. Since June was well below average, we'd be happy to have some more rain fall. I think we're about 4" or 5" below average still. I see more approaching rain appoaching us on the radar, so am hoping it gets here and then stalls over us and rains hard for a while. Our soil isn't saturated enough to make flooding a huge issue here, unlike much of the rest of the state. Our dewpoint was 75 yesterday which is incredibly high and causes breathing difficulties for anyone with asthma or other respiratory issues. So, I knew it would rain hard at some point, since the higher your dewpoint, the more rain that generally will fall. Carol, I'm glad the rain finally found y'all. Maybe your county will look better on the Soil Moisture maps now, cause it was looking pretty sad before. Littledog, My own rain gauge almost never agrees with the Mesonet station either, so I use my measurements...or at least I keep a running total in my head...something like "we have received 3" less than the mesonet station so far this year". In 2007, we had a June similar to yours. I don't remember the exact amount, but it was a lot (I think about a foot in June after 6 or 8" in May) and we had flooding issues both on the Texas side and OK side of the river. In fact, that was one of the very few times that the water at Lake Texoma has over-topped the dam, which resulted in a lot of downstream flooding. I think either Wed. or Thurs. was the 3-year anniversary of the day the water first overtopped the dam. Lake Texoma should start rising soon as the heavy rains that tell in SW OK make their way down the river, but it is a very long way from being fall enough to overtop the dam. I know the Red River was flooding in part of the Jefferson County (the county just west of our county) area last night. Swokiedokie, We have the same. I'm hoping for harder rain so the ponds can refill. I know some folks have had too much rain in the last couple of weeks, or even in the last month or two, but this is the mildest July weather we've had in a while. I love the temps, but bet they won't last much longer. It is, after all, July. Dawn

Jay, That is just sad about the largest farmer in the group getting totally wiped out by weather that otherwise would have been a blessing if only the rain could have fallen without doing all the damage. I come from farming people. My mom's dad was a farmer and a rancher. When I was really young he lived on a farm and raised sheep and a wide variety of vegetable crops. I remember the barn, being chased into the stock tank by a cranky old ram and then getting leeches on my legs while in the stock tank....and I also remember riding the tractor, feeding the chickens, and riding to town with him in his old delapidated pickup truck. I also remember well the windmill, and listening to the farm reports on the local radio station very early every morning. My favorite thing that he grew was popcorn. I thought it was magical to have a grandpa who grew his own popcorn. He never really made enough money to consider himself prosperous....and just barely made enough in the good years to hang on and survive the bad years. When he sold the farm and moved to a city and got a regular job, it broke my heart. My mom always told me that my grandparents (her parents) were poor, but I thought they were rich because they always had a big, beautiful and highly productive garden, berries, and fruit trees. I couldn't imagine that anyone needed anything else, but then I was a child and understood nothing about the need to pay a mortgage, etc. My dad's parents died when he was a child. They were subsidence farmers in the 1920s and 1930s who pretty much only had whatever they could raise to eat because they never got enough of a crop to sell anything for cash money during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression years. The kids stayed together on the farm and kept farming even after losing their folks because young, poor country folks didn't have many options in those days. World War II saved them all by giving them a reason to leave the farm, and leave it, they did. Most of his brothers and sisters always had gardens after they grew up and left the farm, moved to the city and had "real jobs". I think my dad longed to move back to the country and be a farmer but he told me "you can't make a living at it, and I have a family to feed". I always thought maybe they'd move to the country after he retired, but by then it was already becoming apparent he was developing Alzheimer's, so staying in the city was smarter. I think the farmers and ranchers are the true unsung heroes in this land of ours. I just wish that there was a way that family farmers could do what they do and earn a good living at it. Most of the farmers and ranchers I know now have a regular "off the farm" job that pays the bills, and the farming and ranching they do is a sideline that sometimes doesn't even break even. It always seems like the weather can find one way or another to ruin a crop. Until we moved here and got to know a lot of ranchers, I never realized how many cows a rancher can lose to lightning strikes, for example. Sometimes I wonder how anyone makes a living in agriculture. The rain has been so spotty and erratic here that some folks have had a great garden and some haven't. It just depends on if your place has been hit by hail, high winds, flooding rain, or very little rain or whatever. We won't even talk about what a big grasshopper invasion can do. A lot of the Thackerville melon growers had their plants wiped out by late freezes in spring, but replanted and had a good harvest in July anyway. Melons are one of those crops that can be superb when rain falls at the right time but not so great if too much rain falls close to harvest and all the melons start splitting open and rotting. It rained here last night---nearly a half-inch. I was thrilled. We had some winds gusting into the 40s, which really isn't high enough wind to damage much at this time of year, though some of the fall bean plants took a bit of a beating. They're very young and should bounce right back. I've been fortunate to have a really great garden this year, but it comes at a pretty high price, in terms of the amount of time spent covering and uncovering everything in the spring for late frost protection and then in watering a lot in July and August. One of the frustrating things is that no matter how hard you work, a hail storm or flood waters can wipe out most of the entire season's work in minutes. It is August, so that means peppers, peppers, peppers. I've been roasting jalapenos and freezing them this week, and also have been canning jalapenos. I canned a big batch last night and am about to do another big batch now. After I finish that, I will have processed about 9 of the 12 gallons I harvested earlier this week. As soon as I finish the last three gallons, it will be time to pick peppers again.The tomatoes have slowed down a lot in the July and August heat, but a lot of them are in bloom so ought to set some more fruit during this cool spell. It has been a reasonably good tomato year here. I was careful not to plant too many because I didn't want to preserve a lot, and I think we still had too many, but that's better than too few. Maybe you'll get lucky and the first autumn frost this year will be late and even your hail-battered plant will get a chance to produce something. You never know. I remember very fondly the winter (might have been 2004? or 2002?) when we didn't have our first freeze until mid-December. It was an amazingly long tomato season that year. Dawn

We had to look long and hard to find a place in OK where we could live as if we were in the center of a doughnut----a dry doughnut, where the hole gets no rain while the rest of the doughnut gets rain, flash floods, etc. (grin) I bet we couldn't find another location like this one if we tried. You'd think we were deliberately trying to find a place that the rain seems to mysteriously miss time after time. This time, though, it was just a matter of timing----the rain just took its own sweet time to make it to us. It gets old to sit and watch the numbers grow on the rainfall map for everywhere else. I just quit watching after a while because if you think about it for too long, it is depressing. Yesterday I watched it rain to our north, west, and south....... So, overnight it must have started raining here. Then, it drizzled for hours today. Hours and hours and hours. Slow, steady, at times barely-discernible raindrops. The nice thing was that the clouds and rain-cooled air kept our temperatures down today. I doubt we made it out of the 70s, and if we did, it wasn't for long. So, I watched the radar-indicated rainfall maps on my computer inside the house and wasn't impressed. It showed about 0.3" for us after the rain finally ended. After the rain stopped, I stepped outside and we had gigantic puddles everywhere, so I knew the mere 0,30" was incorrect. I splashed my way through the mud and the muck and the puddles to the back garden to check the rain gauge. From the size of the puddles, I knew we had received at least an inch, no matter what the mesonet's radar-indicated rainfall map said. Well, we got right at 1.3" and later in the day I noticed lots of big puddles in town too, so they got about as much as we did. Hooray! We needed rain so desperately. The ground was cracking in the back yard and I was going to have to water heavily to stop the cracks from advancing. Hopefully the rain just did that for me. Unfortunately, y'all know the drill.......on the days we're going to be in the 90s this week as we await the arrival of the next cold front, I bet we will have some awfully high heat index numbers, thanks to all the rain that fell today. Still, I'd rather have rain than not have it. We also have a great chance of rain later in the week, with at least a 50% chance on one day.