We are now having serious rain showers aka cloudbursts. I was in my greenhouse potting up those amaryllis and it was just like being inside a waterfall! Kind of fun! I closed the vents at the roof peak, and let her rip. DH was out drilling the forgotton weep holes in the framework so he is way wetter then me! I even found a gap in the rain to get back to the house (About 30'away) but It would have been easier had I worn my boots! Anyhow, all my big orders of amies are now planted except for one that came with an inch and a half long crack between the basal plate and layers of the bulb. As far as I can see, that whole section of the bulb has no way to get nutrition from the roots. I'll try to photograph it tomorrow and show you and see what you think...should I complain to Van Engelen or just plant it and see what happens. IT looks healthy so far, but I can't imagine any scenario but rot. It is one of 3 Evergreens, the ones I most want to do well.

I think this is a really remarkable rainy spell. It doesn't seem to be running off anywhere like those big downpours that cause me so much grief. The ground just soaks it up when it is slow like it has been. I just hope I can still ammend my soil this weekend for that last bed around the new deck. Hope it's not too soggy. It can stop raining anytime now though. I was the only person at No Longer Bound today. I think they thought anyone crazy enough to be plant shopping today deserves a break and I got some deals. A 2 gal pot of Brunnera for $5! A new white iceplant (do you have that one yet Mike?) don't know the name of it. 3 new Huechera's I think I need every Huechera. I can't stop buying them. I really want Raspberry Ice if anyone sees it please let me know. Well the rain doesn't keep me from buying so my plant ghetto grows and grows.

Amy, Unfortunately it is about to start feeling like July. The good thing about the rain is it has kept us cooler. There's no rain in my 7-day forecast, so I expect we'll dry out a lot over the next week, and we're expected to hit the upper 90s early next week. Can 100 degrees be far behind? Bon, Yay for the rain. You did need it and I'm glad you got it. You may feel stormed out, but it will be a fleeting feeling. We are about to feel the wrath of July heat + high humidity from all the moisture in the ground, so I think it is going to feel worse for a while before it feels better. Carol, Well, Grove was overdue for some heavy rainfall and apparently it finally happened. With all the accidents on the lake over the July 4th weekend, I hope people will be exceptionally carefully out there on the water now that there's all the runoff from all that rainfall. I have about half of my garden weeded and more or less under control---the upper half that dries out more quickly. I got a lot of that weeding done in the two hours I was out there this morning. I quickly harvested the one row of tomato plants that I hadn't harvested from prior to the storm, and then I weeded, weeded, weeded as the sun climbed higher in the sky and the temperatures began heating up. The fence lines are a mess, though, and I have to go slowly and carefully with them because that's one of the favorite hiding places of the timber rattlers. I do the same thing with rain gauges. I've noticed that even the radar-indicated rainfall this year has rarely matched what I've recorded in my rain gauge, and neither does our mesonet station's. It's why I try to keep an unbroken rain gauge (and occasionally a slightly-cracked one that manages to record most of the rainfall) out in the yard at all times. I left the one that cracked in the winter and put a new one beside it. There is only about a 0.10" difference between the two, so the broken one is almost recording correctly. Dorothy, For so long this year, I was worried y'all weren't getting enough rain, but I can see now that you're getting plenty. Last year was perfect for us in terms of rainfal, beginning in mid-June, and once the rain started, it's hardly stopped at all. Prior to mid-June, the drought was so bad I was about to close the garden gate and walk away, so the rain began falling in the nick of time. It can stop now if it wants. After the drought years of 2011-2013, I am just thrilled to have plenty of rainfall and (so far) not too many grasshoppers. It has been a struggle all year to keep up with the bare minimum of mowing, trimming and hand-weeding, but we just keep plugging along, doing what we can when we can and not worrying or fretting about what we can't get done. You can only do whatever the conditions, weather and time available allow, so I try not to worry about the rest. Eventually we'll get it all done. Sandplum, I weeded all I could this morning and was happy with what I got done, but some of those weeds were so big already that I had to dig them out rather than pulling them out. I'll get out there in the cool early morning hours tomorrow and try to work on it for another 2-4 hours. In June and July the harvesting and canning keeps me too busy to focus too much on weeding, and the rain this year has made weeding even harder to accomplish, but the tomato canning is winding down now, so I should get to weed every day for the next week, especially with no rain in the forecast. I think that with a week of weeding every morning, I should catch up on the backlog of weeds waiting to be removed. Y'all, I don't remember exactly what our all-time record rainfall is, but I believe it is around 59". I need to look it up and see. I am fairly certain we'll break that record this year, as Burneyville is sitting at 54" right now. Never, ever, even after 2007, did I think we'd see that sort of rainfall here. Dawn

Nancy, I hope your nice weather lasted. I wasn't watching the weather much last week other than trying to keep an eye on our own. Tim said something to me yesterday that reminded me what a tough summer it has been here. He said he couldn't think of any community in our county having two such awful losses of members in such a short time, and after I thought about it a while, I think he is right. We are in a little unincorporated rural to semi-rural area of Love County in between the towns of Marietta and Thackerville, and our neighbor who was the lineman was the second tragic loss of a community member here in the last couple of months. The first was a gentleman who perished in a fire after the gasoline tanker truck he was driving was cut off in traffic, overturned and burned. Two horrible losses suffered by two families in such a short time in such a small community as ours....it is unfathomable. The first was one of those things that your brain refuses to believe when it hears it, and then the second one was exactly the same.....too horrific to be real. I think all of us here are just so done with 2018 and trying to remain positive and look ahead to what hopefully will be a better year in 2019. I wonder if your burnweed will be burnweed? I still think when Jason IDs a plant, you can take his ID as gospel. I don't think I've ever seen it here, but y'all have such different soils and different climate up there in some ways that it is like we are in a whole different country----ha ha, at least you are in the Green Country and we're in the Mostly Brown Country. That would be funnier were it not so true. Larry, In August of any year, I still think it is better to be too wet than to be too dry. We had good rainfall last week, but the dry ground slurped it right up. Well, at least the rain did fall. Since you came back and posted a photo of your little Yorkie (he is so adorable!), I guess you and the tractor survived the mud and are not stuck out there in it. Jennifer, I didn't try Vick's on the feet because we didn't have any and I wasn't going to go anywhere for any reason. I am starting to feel better but it was a rough week, and I think the recovery is going slowly. I am bored, but that's a good sign, because I don't start feeling bored until I start feeling better. It sounds like you had a really fun day babysitting that six year old. I bet she was disappointed to learn she was going somewhere else the next day! There will be time later to catch up on outdoor work. Just take care of yourself. Nancy, Heavy rainfall in August is such a gift that you just have to get over the pouting, you know! My grandmother always admonished us to never look a gift horse in the mouth. If I whine about rain in August I know what will happen----the following August we won't get any rain at all. So, I hope you got the pouting and all out of your system and can appreciate the gift that August rainfall truly is. Sometimes when we say we are bored, I really think that what we mean is that we aren't able, for whatever reason, to do the things we really want to do. Sometimes I'll be whining to myself that I'm bored, but it isn't because there aren't things to do---they just aren't the things I want to do. Because of that, I don't do them and just sit and say that I am bored. Your 90 degrees sounds nice to me (unless the heat index was, like, 99 or 100). We were 97 on Friday and 96 yesterday. I think today is supposed to be closer to your 90, but I guess I haven't looked at the forecast in a couple of days so I'm not sure. Larry, Hercules is so precious. I love Yorkies but we always have medium to big dogs. I'd have a Yorkie in a heartbeat though. It is hard to watch our furbabies get old and sick. We have been down that road with so many dogs over the years, and our black lab mix, Jet, who is now 13, has chronic kidney disease and, according to the vet, is in the final months of his life. He is on medication and a special prescription diet and I try to treasure every day we have left with him because there likely won't be too many more of them. He was never supposed to be ours. Born to a stray dog, Honey, who followed me home when I was walking our other dogs, he was one of a litter of four. Tim's best friend picked out two of them, Jet and Duke, to adopt as his own when they were only two days old. He got the pick of the litter and we promised Ken we'd reserve them for him and not give them away to anyone else once they were big enough to leave their mother. The following week, Ken was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor. Again, we promised him we'd keep his two puppies with us until his treatments were done and he was ready to bring them home to his ranch. Sadly, his cancer progressed quickly. Diagnosed in late March or early April, he was gone before the end of May. By then, we were too attached to "Ken's dogs" to let them go, so we kept them. His wife didn't want them, as she felt she couldn't cope with two new dogs while coping with his death and trying to keep the ranch running full time while also working full time in Dallas. We understood and were happy to keep Jet and Duke ourselves. Duke left us three years ago and I've been all too aware ever since then that Jet's time is coming too. It is hard. I wish they aged at the same rate as we do, but they don't. As hard as it is to lose our furbabies, I have accepted that we just have to endure the pain of losing them----it is the price we pay for having had such wonderful pet companions to share our lives. Dawn