No damage here, but three consecutive nights of rain have given us 2.8" of needed moisture. Now to get busy weeding and mulching.

I'm glad you got the rain. I know you've been needing more than you're getting. I weeded yesterday until the imminent arrival of storms sent me running inside.

I miss Jay on all the rain reports!

I decided to ride my bike to the post office downtown, and then just kept going. Ended up by the brick-town canal, and rode to the river trails. Quite a mess down there. Of course, I took pictures:
http://smg.photobucket.com/user/tahlequahgardens/library/2015/May%206%20storm%20damage

I've got about 3" extra somebody can have! Anybody?

Starting to see the affects on my Early Girls.

The bar I work at lost power for about 10 hours and got flooded while we were working, (Wednesday) quite a few patrons were unable to go home due to their homes being so badly flooded. We stayed open for them, and this is central OKC on NW expressway and Classen.

Lisa, I wonder if Jay even has a garden these days, I believe he has other things on his mind. LOL

I am happy for Jay. Love is a many-splendored thing.

I'm sitting here staring at the radar and waiting for hail to come pound my garden into oblivion while hoping that it doesn't. When the tornado touched down near Waurika a few minutes ago, all our storm spotters checked in and went to their spotting stations. Getting ready to go to storm cellar if that warned storm in Montague looks like it is headed our way.

Praying for everyone, their families and properties.

How did I miss out on that fun fact? Good for him!!

Dawn..stay safe!

Not sure how much we are going to get here in Durant, if it slides north, we might just get rain.... if it slides north... Otherwise, we are gonna be in for a bumpy couple of hours here!

Has anyone heard from Paula? The flooding around here is really bad (my house is fine, although we have a new ravine going through our backyard) and since she was aready having problems, I've been worried about here.
If the torrential rains hit the same course tomorrow that they have been hitting all week (newcastle to Norman to Pott county), I can't even imagine the type of flooding problems we are going to have.
Hope everyone is safe and dry.

No tornados today for us but more rain and more flooding. We received about 3 inches today. Dawn you sound like we were Wednesday, in and out of the cellar. I am so stressed out, the cattle hav e all been moved to high ground but the corn is all underwater. If it quits soon we may save the corn crop (silage from the cattle). we had to go over to Portland and SW 149 because the fire department was trying a water rescue (all of 149th for about two miles is under water) had to make sure if they cut fences were could fix them. We have about 250 head in that one place. I will NEVER understand the people that drive into water like that. We are not talking a little ponding, we are talking a river running hard and very high!!! Do they not understand all the people (firefighters and police) and property that they put in danger. I donot even want to think about 250 head of terrified 800 lb steers loose in this weather.

Ok, I am pretty well ranted out. The rain can stop anytime now!

Let us all say a prayer that tomorrow's weather does not develop.

I love rain, but I'm so over this. I'm very fortunate to still have power and even TV right now. Just down the road, they do not. We had horrible hail, but not the tennis ball size that was a mile or so away.

Thanks for including animals in the "check in", Dawn. This weather is hard on them too. My dogs are losing their minds. I put lavender oil on their ears and it does help, but I may need to get out the doggie valium that was prescribed for fireworks. Also, they're just bored. The rain over the last few days, seems to start right when I get home from work, so they don't get a walk. And do chickens get bored? They're still in a dog crate in a bathroom at 2 months. When the weather was lovely and nice, I would put them in a "play pen" thing as I worked on the garden--I could keep an eye on them and they got to scratch around for bugs. I've been letting them out in the bathroom for a few minutes each day, but you can imagine the mess.

I'm grieving my garden. I need to get over it and start planning again.

Dawn, did your corn stand up again?

Oklamoni, thanks for sharing your pictures.

It has calmed down a lot here. The Tornado Warnings across the river from us expired and all we've had has been run-of-the-mill severe thunderstorms with rain, wind, thunder, lightning, etc....nothing really bad.

I think Central OK had some areas get hit a lot harder this evening than we were. We do remain under a Tornado Watch until 3 a.m. but that's becoming an everyday thing here lately. I think our specific weather looked really bad on radar, and not all that bad in person.

The endless rain is old. We're all gonna have water gardens, but not the planned kind of water gardens with water lilies, pickerel rush, lotus and such. Just muddy brownish-red flooded yards and gardens that aren't too scenic.

Sounds tough for you Stockergal! I don't understand people going through deep water where they don't know how deep either.

I snagged a couple of pictures of folks driving through my flooded road....

Ugh, stockergal...I can't even imagine having to worry about livestock with all of this. I'm frazzled as it is! Be safe.
I think the severe risk is over for us, so I think I'm going to have to have a glass of wine and a hot bath. Please, everyone else check in when you get a chance.
Krista

Wulfletons, that glass of wine sounds good, enjoy!!

I hate to even say it, but my spot is actually doing okay. We are getting rain, yes, but we haven't had hail or tornadoes or floods. I probably just jinxed us. I think I probably got 2 inches of rain tonight..so maybe 6" for this week.

It looks like we will only get rain tonight. It isn't here yet, but it is close enough that I can hear the thunder.

Stockergal, I don't get it either. Do people think they all are superheroes and can walk (or drive) on top of the water? It makes me crazy. Tim and his staff had to deal with people trying to drive through a flooded airport terminal road that was closed down and barricaded for 4 hours last night, and that was after other people already were stranded in the deep water in their vehicles. The same kind of stuff went on in our county last night and again tonight. I'd never drive into deep water but people seem to think it is okay to give it a try. Everyone thinks the rules apply to someone else, not them.

We are living in a parallel universe. While I was reading about your cattle and the fence, firefighters from our VFD were out working an accident in which a vehicle crashed through a pasture fence....and in an odd twist, the pasture belonged to a gentleman who's on our fire board. I noticed that they were trying to contact him to get him to come out and confirm if there were cattle in that pasture because they were going to leave if there was any chance there might be cattle in there and that the fence needed to be fixed before the cops and firefighters left the scene. All of this was occurring in torrential rainfall and flooding.

Hazel, It is hard on the animals. I've been trying to get the dogs and cats outside for a bit when it isn't raining, but they are tired of wet paws and just sit on the porch and look at me, as if they're saying "I don't want to walk out there and get my feet wet." The two young dogs, roughly 8 months old, are crate-trained and their crate is like a security blanket. When the thunder and lightning are getting to them, they go get into one dog crate together and cuddle up with their blanket. The older dogs are half-deaf so the weather doesn't bother them noise-wise, but I think they're getting tired of the mud too. I know I am.

The corn stood up on its own and looked great this morning. Then, along came tonight's massive rainfall and rowdy winds and I have no idea if the corn will be standing upright or lying on its side when I look at it tomorrow morning. For all I know, it may be floating down the Red River, with assorted vehicles, boats and houses by this time. We have had huge rainfall and the Red River is flooding and expected to crest tomorrow afternoon here at the bridge between Love County, OK and Cooke County, TX. I suspect tomorrow's crest is just the beginning. Before long, I bet Lake Texoma will be flooding. We've lived here long enough to know what this sort of prolonged rainy spell results in, and it isn't pretty.

With the chickens, I can imagine the smell especially! Chickens probably get stressed. We have a Polish crested hen that paces and hollers if you are slow to come let them out to free-range every morning. Our hens are good about putting themselves under the deck or back into their coop if it starts raining, but we are keeping the chicks, ranging in age from 3 days to 5 weeks, inside the coop until the rain stops falling for hours every day.

The rain keeps coming in waves and I don't think we're done yet. It rained so hard tonight that I imagine there's going to be 2 or 3" more in the rain gauge tomorrow morning. I hope I have a garden left, and I hope that our gravel driveway didn't wash away. The rain fell tremendously hard.

I keep telling myself rain is good and we usually don't get enough of it, but I am so over this rain that it isn't even funny. Every square inch of our place is either mud or water...or muddy water. The plants are at their limit in terms of how much they'll tolerate and I feel like I am there too. Unfortunately, there's a whole lot more rain coming. Without even knowing how much rain fell this evening, I know we've already had more rain than our average May rainfall and we're only one week into the month.

Today in the garden I could smell that sour, mucky smell of waterlogged soil that has been too wet for too long. I'm hoping it is just the pathways, but fear it is all of the garden. Even the raised beds are far too wet.

Our rainfall for the next 7 days is expected to be as heavy as it was for the past 7 days. It is amazing, but in a bad way.

Lisa, If we got as much rain tonight as I think we did, then we'll be at 7 or 8" for the week, which is so ridiculous considering we came into May totally waterlogged to begin with.

Carol, We had the most incredible lightning. I hope these storms have calmed down before they get to your place. They were so incredibly loud and the constant lightning was like a strobe light that wouldn't quit.

I just dread Saturday. If Friday's storms didn't somehow do something to lower the severe weather risk, then it is likely to be a horrible day and we may have a major tornado outbreak. It is like the weather is determined to hunt down our gardens and find a way to damage or kill every living plant. After we get through Saturday, then there's Sunday's severe weather. I'm so ready for a break---even for just one sunny, beautiful day, even though the humidity and heat index probably will not be pleasant if we get that sunny day.

2.25 inches in the rain guage at 12:30 am. It is not raining as hard as it did earlier, Radar is yellow now instead of red. Weird storm tracks tonight, the storms were circling back on themselves. I just went out and emptied the seedling trays of water. I have most in solo cups in roasting pans, and the pans filled up. I fought the urge to water during the sun today, knowing what night would bring. We had to take the greenhouse down yesterday, the poles were sinking in the mud and it threatened to topple over. I hope y'all are safe and dry-ish tonight.

We ended up with 2.4" in the rain gauge for yesterday/overnight. I emptied out the three rain gauges about 5 or 10 minutes before today's first thunderstorm arrived. This is getting ridiculous.

My corn that had stood back up yesterday is down on the ground again. Normally when a thunderstorm causes the corn to lodge, it is all blown down in the same direction, clearly knocked over by strong straight-line wind. This morning the corn was down in various directions, like swirly wind knocked it down. I just shook my head when I saw it. This weather gets more squirrely by the minute, with no insult aimed at the squirrels.

Dawn, we did get thunder and lightening, but I have seen worse. The mystery is the rainfall, I guess. It rained long and hard but the Mesonet is only showing a little over an inch for our county. Al had left an empty straight sided bucket in the yard and it had 4 3/4 inches of water in it this morning. The wheelbarrow had 4 inches in one end and over 6 in the other. We were out and about at 6:30 AM and two of our roads were closed so we had to drive to a different road to get to town. By the time we returned home they had opened the road, but you could see that the bridge had been underwater and there was a lot of debris washed up on the edge of it.

I have a few pepper plants in standing water today, and a few potato plants over on their side, but a little more hilling should take care of that. We haven't had hail (praying we don't), so our problem is just dealing with too much water. Most of you have had a lot more rainfall than we have had, but we have had more than plenty. Sure wish we had another Mesonet station that came closer to reporting our conditions. I guess I need to buy rain gauges by the dozen since I always seem to let them freeze, or break them in some other way. I was in our 5th wheel yesterday and there was a new one on the table and last night I was wishing I had brought it home with me.

We added up our daily rain gauge totals and since Tuesday, the total is 13 inches....and it's only Saturday morning! We've had no additional flooding since Ken got the tin-horn cleaned out but last night had a lot of standing water.

Last night I was in downtown OKC at the Civic Center. There was one point on Anderson Road driving home that I thought I'd made a mistake but the darkness made it look worse than it was. Ken took this pic around 7 last evening.

"How high's the water, momma?" I have a friend from Seminole who found a catfish in her yard from her pond level rising, then receding. I went to Seminole/Pott county line to check on damage from Wednesday night's storm in an almost 100 year old cemetery. Hubby and I had done some cleanup last weekend. Lots of limbs from old, dying trees and M-U-D. At one point, I stepped in a bad spot, shoes got stuck, and I almost fell over. Peeled off my socks, put my shoes back on and worked until the rain started....again. I didn't even try to walk in the low spots.

I do have a garden but still limiting what I plant due to the ongoing drought. Last summer was good. I ended up with over 19" for the year. But this year shows signs of reverting back somewhat to a drier trend. Basically tomatoes, celery, peppers, sweet potatoes, melons, cukes and a small amount of a few other things. Also going with what don't require as much labor. First year in many that I didn't plant garlic. Have some volunteer that looks good though.

Jay, it's good to "see" you! I still watch your area for rain :)

Okay here in Tahlequah. Three trees fell, but two were about dead. What a mess. They damage some branches on my dogwood, and then both of my privots or spirea--whatever they are, and of course my ferns and Solomon's seal in that area are trampled, but if that is all I have to complain about, I am doing good here. Just hope my new Artemisia plants don't drown. I bought several of them from Companion Plants. And I got three pearly everlasting that I hope don't get too much water, but we can never have too much water. When I think of the drought in California I realize how fortunate we are here.