Yup, I was just at a neighbors house. They were trying to figure out how to plant. I told them to wait.

Very wet here. Mesonet is showing a lot of strange readings here too. I wonder if they actually put an eyeball on their sensors or calibrate them.

Would you please stop hogging all the rain? (grin) I'm just kidding.

That sure is a lot of rain in a short time. If I were a tomato plant already growing in the ground there, I might have gotten droopy too, and then I would have gone and signed up for Scuba lessons.

We have had about 2.2" of rain this week, with more in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow. It is too wet to do anything today, but yesterday the rain was just light sprinkles until late in the day so I got some work done in the garden, though it mostly consisted of digging up Laura Bush petunia volunteers from the onion bed so it could be "weed-free". Maybe tomorrow I'll replant them in other parts of the garden, unless we get another inch of rain today and tonight. I'm going to wait and see if the Saturday storms drop any hail before I plant anything else. I don't mind the rain so much as constantly having "hail up to the size of...." in the forecast every day. Granted, we seldom actually get the hail down here, but for today, it is hail up to the size of baseballs to softballs. Those words hurt a gardener's heart. I cannot imagine what hail the size of softballs would do to a garden (well, I can, but the fact is that if that hits anyone's home, there's a lot bigger problems than the smashed-to-smithereens garden).

I wonder if the rainwater out in western OK is being absorbed by the soil or running off or both? I hope it is filling up creeks, ponds and reservoirs so they can save it for a rainy day.

I squished around outside early this morning and opted not to even go into the garden as it is just so wet. I'm not real worried about the plants in raised beds, but the plants growing at grade level at the downhill side of the garden aren't the happiest plants in America this week. I did notice that some of the tomatoes in one of the raised beds (lower in the sloping garden than the other 2 raised beds of tomatoes) have developed edema and that was before last night's rain. If the rain will stop for a while and the soil will dry out, the edema should go away. I almost never see edema here, though I know some plants had it in 2009 and in 2007.

I may never get the back garden planted at the rate things are going. I got a portion of it rototilled last weekend and had trouble with how wet the soil was then. Now, over 2" of rain later, I cannot imagine when I even can step foot in it again. That sand becomes almost like quicksand when wet....you step in it and sink down several inches. Maybe the rain will make the vole tunnels collapse and the voles will go away for a while.

Despite all the rain, the Drought Monitor still shows us being abnormally dry. That sort of makes me giggle, but I do think they know what they are doing. A few days of sunshine and warm weather dries up the ground fairly fast and we can go from too wet to too dry if we go about a week without rain. We have to get a lot wetter than we are now for us to stop being in danger of quickly slipping back into drought.

We have mosquitoes the size of B-52s and they are waiting right outside the back door when I walk out early in the morning. I mean they are hovering at the door, just waiting. Or, they were. The crane flies figured out the skeeters were lurking near the back door so now the craneflies are lurking there too, as well as in the greenhouse which also seems to have a healthy skeeter population. The longer the craneflies hang around, the fewer skeeters we see. Down in the garden though, black flies hang around and bite me all day long. It is making me crazy. I spend half my time gardening and the other half swatting flies.

My onions are exactly the opposite of yours. My short days are the smallest and weakest-looking of the bunch and the intermediate days are, appropriately enough, right in the middle, and my two long-day varieties are huge. It is aggravating as the short day onions begin sizing up here in early to mid-May, so they have the least amount of growing time left to size up the foliage before they bulb up. At the rate the long-days are growing, if nothing changes, they're going to have 13-15 leaves before the bulbs begin to size up. I've never seen onions as happy as those long-day types are this year.

I already had to remove the low tunnels with their bird netting from the onion bed, the tomato beds and one bean (pole beans) bed because the plants were growing up and hitting the netting. I caged the tomatoes, but the cages won't protect the plants from hail like the bird netting did. The onions are kind of on their own now and so are the pole beans. I need to take the tunnels off the corn beds and the bush bean and bush pea beds, but I'm not going to do that until tomorrow....just in case it is our unlucky day or night and we get some big hail. The vining snap peas are about 1/3 up their trellis at one end of the bed, but not really climbing at the downhill, wet end of that same bed. I'm not sure how they're going to do. Even in the raised bed, they seem too wet.

Overall, though, the garden is doing really well despite the rain. I'm so much more used to being dry than being wet, but it is nice to not be having to irrigate all the time. Our rain has been so well-timed that I haven't even had to water flats of seedlings that often. In fact, I go out after a rain storm and pour out the excess water that is sitting in the bottom of the flats.

The big downside to all the moisture is that every weed seed that exists sprouts, with new ones daily. Once I get thick-enough mulch on a bed, that virtually ends, but I don't have all the beds and paths to that point yet. Every week when Tim mows, I do mulch triage---selecting the areas that most need mulch on that day to be the recipient of the grass clippings. The ones that got a thick layer from last week's clippings are weed-free, and I hope at some point this coming week (no rain in our forecast at the present time for Sunday and Monday), the same can be said about several more beds and paths. And, while I was typing this, they downsized the hail size from baseball-to-softball sized hail to only golf ball-to-tennis ball sized. My garden has survived golf-ball sized hail with less damage than I even expected, so the new hail forecast is somewhat less worrisome.

It feels like an El Nino spring and I hope that carries over into summer so that I won't have to spend my whole summer watering the garden. If you get tired of all that excess moisture, just send it down here.

Dawn, according to the Mesonet rainfall chart you have had 1 1/3 inches more this year than we have had, but your plant available water at 4 inches is .62 and mine is 1.30. Of course, that is at the station and this number is certainly not a reflection of my garden, and probably not yours either since we have improved soil that will hold more water. In addition, I have had more rain than the station has recorded. I have a few plants in standing water today and they can't last long with all that water and no air pockets. I'm glad I have backup plants. I haven't planted any of the hot weather things that I normally direct seed; okra, melons, squash, etc. I think I need to start some of them inside so they are ready when the ground is dry enough to plant again.

I watch all those numbers and they baffle me, but I believe the mesonet station has sandy soil and I have mostly clay. I will say that the percentage of plant available water seems to make more sense to me than just the straight plant available water. However, I watched this last couple of weeks as plant available water fell, and I could see it more in the unimproved pasture soil, which dried and cracked and did all that while my garden soil still squished. Finally, just before rain hit again, even the garden soil was dry on the top inch or two in the raised beds, but if I pulled out a piece of rebar used to anchor a low tunnel hoop. I got that sucking sound of heavily waterlogged soil down deeper in the ground.

It is raining cats and dogs so we'll be wetter, wetter, wetter tomorrow, and a big storm is crossing the DFW metro area. We got home from a structure fire around dinner time and Tim showered and flew out of here as fast as he could to get ahead of the rain storms. He was just a couple of miles from his station when Dr. Forbes said on TWC that the severe weather with straight line winds in the 60-70+ range were moving into the metro area, so Tim just barely got to work ahead of it. He could see it approaching from his west as he drove down I35 and I was watching the radar and calling him every now and then to tell him what was happening.

For most of this year, we've been running 1-2" heavier in year-to-date rainfall than the mesonet station, but western Love County had a big thunderstorm run through it early this evening well before the rain arrived here, so they may be catching up with us on the rainfall now. Just a little south of us, Thackerville has had even more. The rainfall in our county has been all over the map this year. It is kinda crazy.

As long as hail isn't pounding us, it's all good. It is SO hard to be unhappy about too much rain since we more often have too little. I don't know if I could handle the type of rain you and Dorothy get in a good year because my soil couldn't handle it. It would be like 2009 when I had to build raised mounds on top of my raised beds to circumvent 21" of rain in 6 weeks.

Send some of that rain back to OKC!! Somehow we are getting ignored. The rains are mostly going to either side of us. My ground is wet, but we are not getting enough rain to fill up our lakes.

Lisa, I wish I could. We had much less rain than normal during the winter months, but it is trying to catch up now that I want to plant. I saw you pic of Hefner the other day and it looks sad.

The lake is really bad, and what is really scary is that we cannot pull down from Canton, because they have less than we do. Although, I think Canton has been getting a little love with all the western rains.

Boy we're water logged here in town too!!! I'm wondering if part of my poor maple tree's problem isn't from all the rain. It's right in the path of the river (:>) ) that runs though our yard!! All the neighbor's water comes in our yard. Who ever did the landscaping for this neighborhood should be fired!!!!

We all remember the drought years, the dry spells, the times when the rain just doesn't come, right? So, why does so much rain also make us crazy? I know why----because we want for the rain to fall when and where we want it, but it just doesn't work that way.

I'd love to have slightly drier weather in spring so the soil could be dry enough to plant, and then have more rain in July and August so the plants can grow without us having to do monumental irrigation. How often does it work out that way? Well, for me, it was that way last year, but that's rare, and the Jan-May2014 drought that left us with less than 7" of rain over 5 months made it hard for the plants to grow much at all even with irrigation. Mother Nature made up for it with flooding water in the garden in June and July. It was kind of wonderful. Rarely has the garden been as happy as it was in those two months. It also was highly productive as the tomato plants never stopped producing until I felt sorry for myself for having to can them all and starting yanking out plants in self-defense. I canned over 800 jars of fruits and veggies last year, which probably is the most ever since we moved here. I enjoy canning and putting up the harvest in other ways, but it can be exhausting.

We're having that kind of asparagus year here---it is hard to keep up with the harvest and hard to eat it all fresh. I need to freeze some for future meals because we're kind of approaching the point where we can't bear to look at another asparagus spear.

Since we cannot make the rain fall when and where and how we'd like, we just do the best we can with whatever we get, but this is putting me in the mood to go shopping----not for plants, but for rain boots and a new raincoat, jacket-length, so I can work in the rain (when there's no lightning and thunder).

In the past week, about 2.6" has fallen at our house, and all the big puddles have merged into one big lake. The frog population is exploding, but where will all of them go when the temporary ponds that are just gigantic puddles dry up? It's nice to have frogs again. I have been seeing leopard frogs in my garden. I hope they're eating grasshoppers. I hope everything is eating grasshoppers. I have Semaspore but haven't spread it because we are getting rain 3 times a day.

One downside to all the rain is ants everywhere, and not just fire ants, but all kinds of ants. I keep having to spray around the exterior foundation with orange oil to keep them out of the house and still I have found small ants in my kitchen every morning. It looks like they are coming in though the window frame somehow. Tim and I are going to look around window frame/siding area on the exterior of the house and see if we need to put some new caulking there or something. We always have lots of any problems in wet years, but usually the ants are coming in near a door frame or something, not a window. We have fire ant mounds the size of mountains. We haven't treated the yard itself for fire ants in quite a few years, but I think we're going to break down and do it this year. Organic fire ant baits are hard to find in stores so I order them online, and this year I'm going to order a whole case.

Lisa, I wish y'all were getting some of this rain. I know that Lake Texoma is up about a foot in recent days, and probably more than that after the rain we've had the last couple of days, and it takes a ton of rain to raise the water level in a lake as large as Texoma. Aren't our rainiest months this time of year May and June? That means y'all still have a lot of time left to expect good late spring/early summer rainfall.

It has been great to see western and northwestern OK getting some rain for a change, but the panhandle counties largely keep getting missed too.

It is too wet to do anything at all outdoors today unless we want to stomp around in the lake that is our back yard and side yard. I have grumpy dogs and cats in the house whining and complaining about mud and water and wet and muddy paws. The chickens don't care. They are out there free-ranging through the tall grass (mowed only 1 week ago which seems like ages with the grass and weeds growing like weeds) and walking right through the puddles. I hope they are eating the grasshoppers.

Sorie, That is aggravating. There always seems to be a home in every neighborhood where the river just runs through their yard, and it sounds like that's your yard.

Our property gets runoff from property on three sides that sit higher than we do, but the only one that bothers me is the runoff from the south that affects the veggie garden. In a wet year, a river runs underneath my garden from the neighboring property to our south. The worst of it is about 6-8" below my raised beds and it can render the north side of the garden, which is the lowest-lying part, completely unusable. That area hasn't been dry yet this year, not even on the surface, and not even when higher areas seem fairly dry. I think it will be impossible to grow anything there this year except in the two raised beds where the potatoes are growing. In both 2007 and 2009 that end of the garden didn't dry out until August and nothing did well there. I need to build more really tall raised beds at that end of the garden. The two raised beds there now sit about 20" above grade level and are lined with hardware cloth to keep out voles. Any future raised beds we build there will be the same height so that essentially all the plant roots are above grade level. It is hard to keep tall beds like that happy in dry years, but without them, that area is unusable in wet years.

The only plants that consistently do well in that area in a wet year are swamp mallows, but then they die out in the dry years.

I'm trying to be relaxed and happy about having a wet spring, but in the back of my mind I know that wet, humid springs usually bring lots more pest and disease issues than usual, and let's not even think about the kinds of Heat Index readings we are going to get if we stay wet and humid.

We were supposed to be mostly sunny today. Well, so far, mostly sunny has consisted of 2 or 3 breaks in the clouds where we had direct sun for about 5 minutes.

It is supposed to be windy today and the wind has increased a lot this morning. Maybe the wind will help the puddles dry up more quickly, but I bet the soil stays heavily saturated all week.

We were soaked before yesterday's rains. And tonight the thermom. outdoors reads 30 degrees.

Oh no Bonnie. Did you lose anything?

No, thank goodness. I pulled them in about 11pm. They didn't seem to suffer any damage.

Bon, are you sure you are getting a good temp reading? That is really low, and the lowest Mesonet reading I saw in the entire State was 37. Do you live in a really low spot? We dropped to 45 but I had a lot of things covered anyway because we had thunderstorms until around 8 PM. They were saying we could get hail, so I covered my tomato plants just in case. We got lucky and not only didn't have hail, but received only a small amount of rain. I really just wanted to sleep this morning but knew I had to get out early to uncover those plants before they got too hot. We are staying cool tho, and it is only 55 now with a forecast of 64 later in the day.

I'm glad you didn't get hail and a whole lot more rain. A few weeks back I suspected that Perkins Mesonet station was not quite similar to what's happening at my house in Cushing. Last week I was noticing about a ten degree difference. Sure enough, I was wanting a wood burning stove last night and this morning. I flipped the radiant heater on in the bedroom about 2am.

I still haven't put the seedlings back out.

Ten degrees consistently is a big difference. I routinely see 3 to 6 degree differences in our readings and those at the Mesonet, as well as those at our county's Cooperative Weather Observer's location. Our Co-op observer is about halfway between us and the mesonet station so sometimes our readings are very close to his but sometimes they are not at all the same.

I tested my theory that temperatures can vary a great deal in a fairly small area by putting 5 thermometers at various places within 75' of our house in 2011. All were 5' above ground in full shade so that direct sun shining on a thermometer wouldn't give a bad reading. What did I learn? All 5 thermometers rarely record exactly the same temperature at the same time. It usually is only a degree or maybe a little more, but sometimes it as much as 2 degrees---all within a fairly small area.

There is no real consistency over the long term between the way our property's temperature readings vary from the Mesonets. Sometimes we're a lot hotter here, sometimes we're a lot cooler, and sometimes the temperatures are about the same. Usually we are colder at night in spring than the Mesonet is, but this year is backwards and we have been warmer at night. It also has been rainier here. So, this year, I've preferred our weather to the weather at the Mesonet station.

This is why I check my own soil temperatures too. It doesn't matter what the soil temperature is at the Mesonet station when I'm planting seeds. The seeds I'm planting will be germinating and growing in our soil, not theirs. I still look at the Mesonet data daily but base my decision-making on observed temperatures at our house.

I'm glad your seedlings weren't damaged.

Just a couple more weeks and we should be beyond the point where late cold damage is even a remote possibility.

And my beds are so dry on top I can hardly get carrots to push through. We got pretty cool last night too. it was nice but my corn and beans are getting confused I think.

its true we do want just the right amount of rain at the right time, no more no less.

The wind was too cold, today. The sun was out but the wind fought the warmth. Tomorrow should be better as Mesonet suggests rising temps. I'm super glad I haven't planted any warm crops, yet. On the flip side, it has been perfect weather for cool crops. The taste of the kale is outstanding and the potatoes are going wild, the garbanzos are giddy and my puny poppy plants rise to the occasion.

Kim, To help the carrots break through, water the surface slowly with a sprinkler that is set to run at a low rate or with a soaker hose. Then put down cardboard (held down at the corners by something so it won't blow all the way to Tulsa) on top of the moist soil. Leave it there to prevent crusting and to hold in moisture. Lift it every morning and evening and watch for signs of sprouting seeds. As soon as you see the first sprouts, remove the cardboard or board. Of course, this only works if no carrots are up yet.

In the future, one way to work around crusty soil would be to make a furrow about the width and depth of your index finger. Fill it with good finished compost. Sow the seeds in the compost trench. Keep it moist. They'll sprout fast in the loose compost.

Another way to help the carrot seeds break through the crusty soil is to soil radishes along with the carrot seeds. Radish seeds will germinate first and produce larger sprouts that will push up through crusty soil and pave the way for the carrots.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to deal with crusty soil.

Bon, I am loving the cool weather and hope it lasts. We'll be hot and dry all too early as it is. We are, of course, a bit warmer here and I have beans and corn that are knee-high. This will be the first year in ages where I'll likely be picking snap beans at the same time I'm harvesting sugar snap peas. It is a crazy, mixed-up weather year. It isn't often that potatoes, onions and sugar snap peas are deliriously happy and growing like mad at the very same time that beans, corn, tomatoes and peppers are equally happy and growing equally well. Both the warm season and cool season crops are getting the kind of weather they like about half the time and it shows in how evenly matched their growth is. The asparagus is insane. I cannot even harvest it fast enough to keep up and many spears that have come up this year have been as big around as my thumb.....or bigger.

More and more this year's weather is reminding me of the spring of 2012, and that was a superb garden year.

Dawn

I did sow the carrots with the radishes and some areas were great and some are slow and some are non existent. the weeds are coming up and the radishes are great too. I planted 1000's of carrot seeds and some may be too deep. or they could be old seeds ? in the fall I will try different methods to see what helps. I will take a better look at the ones that aren't coming up.

Could be old seed. Much depends on how long ago you sowed the seed. In cooler soil, they can take their time germinating. If the soil temperature was below 50 when you sowed your seed, depending on how cold the soil was, it could take 6 weeks or longer to germinate. Once the soil temps are above 50, you should get germination in a couple of weeks. Once soil temps are in the 60s, the carrot seeds should germinate in about a week. Your location likely is complicated by the wind. Maybe on a windy day, your carrot seeds that haven't yet germinated blew away

Ha they are probably in Oklahoma by now. I thinned beets and other stuff tonite and have over a gallon of baby greens and 4 little radishes. I am going to replant the one bed of carrots with something else. Most of them never came up and the few that did are so spread out I feel like its wasting a good bed. The careless weeds and beets came through. When I move over there it will be easier to water and or lay cardboard out. I have several areas where I planted them so I will still have carrots, just not as many as I had hoped for. As long as I get some for littleman to eat.

@soonergrandmom

I'm laughing. I'm laughing so hard !! Permaculture. My cold morning temps? And the thermometer reading low 40s in the mornings? it's located on the SE side of the lot where I intentionally allowed the saplings in the fence line to grow. My intention was to replace all the trees that succumbed to drought. Most of them are surrounding this area and the thermom sits smack dab in the middle. I created this cool down effect. LOLOLOL

Bon, That's possible if the trees are leafed out and transpiration is occurring. Still, it seems likely your local geography and wind patterns play a role in it as well. Hopefully the weather will warm up soon, if it ever stops being rainy, foggy, misty and drizzly, and your early morning low temperatures will stop dropping so low. Having said that, if you walk the approximately 300 feet from our back door, down the driveway towards the road, walking past the garden about midway to the road, you'll definitely feel cooler air as you pass by the garden. The hotter the day, the more you notice the cooler air right beside the garden. It is amazing. I notice it every day in summer when I walk down to the mailbox and then back up to the house again. It is noticeable most of the time, but especially striking in late afternoon when we are just roasting in the heat. Tim and I have noticed it for years. I am sure that the cooler air is a result of plant transpiration, and it likely is not only the garden plants, but from the woodland plants in the woods just north of the woodland and on the neighboring property to the garden's south.

It is too bad there isn't a corresponding plant process (not including the burning of dead plants by fire) that could warm up the air around your thermometer and your garden. Sunshine will do that, but I don't know if anyone in OK will recognize the sun when/if we see it again.

Dawn