Sweet corn here is from Florida and it was not bad at 20 cents an ear. I put an ear in the microwave. It was 95f here yesterday, 91F the day before and we had a three day yard sale thursday, Friday and Saturday, so no cooking then either. I didn't cook one darned thing this weekend except pancakes for Bud and Makayla, who spent the weekend. Other than that we ate ice cream and cold sandwiches and the kids ran through the sprinkler while I planted artichokes and tomatoes and took a break every five minutes to stand in the sprinkler! I have two flats of tomatoes at the farm, that's 96 plants, a mix of Rutgers and Bonny Best. Here in my raised beds at the house I've limited myself to two of each variety I planted except the white tomatoes. I planted two Cherokee Purple, although they never do particularly well. Also two Pineapple, two Big Rainbow, two Golden Jubilee, two SunGold, two Mortgage lifter and a dozen of the as yet unidentified "white" tomato. Mother saved seeds from last year, I bought a container of tomato plants from the 4H kids last year that were simply labelled "white". They were one of the best tomatoes I've ever eaten, so this year I have a dozen plants, LOL. I think they may be White Queen or something similar, a beefsteak type tomato. I started two dozen artichokes inside about March, no one I know in Michigan has ever grown artichokes successfully so of course I have to try. I don't have air conditioning and the pool isn't quite clean yet, so it was way too hot to cook, even outside. Too hot to eat too. Annie

Dulahey, I am so sorry to hear about all the damage, but you and your family are okay. Everything else can be fixes. Your garden and yard are so beautiful and I am confident you'll have everything back shipshape in no time at all. That's too bad about the onions. You still could yank them out of the ground (if the growing tips are damaged and I imagine they are), slice or chop and freeze them to use in cooking. That's the hard thing about growing both corn and onions here---if the growing tip is broken, the plants don't regrow and produce. If by chance your outer leaves are broken but the growing tips in the center are intact, the onions might recover. At least you didn't take a harder hit to the house---so, as bad as things look now, they could be worse. I hope the little Purple Martins were okay. Our PMs already have their second round of eggs in their nests, and the juvenile birds from the first hatch are flying and doing their share of eating the nine billion mosquitoes that the wet conditions have brought to us. (I'm just guestimating nine billion---I didn't go out and do a mosquito census.) You know, there's tons of things you could start from seed now and still get a great harvest: squash, watermelons, okra, and even the southern peas of your choice (blackeyes, pink eye purple hull, zipper, crowder, cream, or lady peas). Don't let this weather steal your gardening joy. Even flowers and herbs would be enjoyable compared to looking at empty beds and thinking about what the storms took from you. Earth Sister, I agree with everything you said. I'd be so tempted to take all that trash and return it to them as well, although Tim likely would stop me from doing it. I have said it many times and will say it over and over and over again: we won the Best Neighbors In The World lottery when we bought this land and moved here, having nothing but the best neighbors on all sides of us. I still cannot believe we got so lucky, and wish y'all had had the same luck we've had. It only takes one un-neighborly neighbor to ruin a neighborhood. Busy1, I am sorry for your neighbor troubles too. Maybe the rain will wash them away. George, How could you sleep through the storms? I got almost no sleep on Wed night/Thursday morning because our storms rolled in around 1 or 2 am and stayed loud and crazy forever. I got twice as much sleep last night so I feel like a new person this morning. kfrinkle, I assume you got what already had come through here. It was so loud and crazy with all that lightning and thunder, and it goes without saying that none of us down here in SC OK wanted or needed more rain. Our rainfall never matches our mesonet station's either as we're several miles from them. I try to keep a running total for our place in my head and we often run higher than our mesonet station all spring and sometimes in the summer, but by the end of the year they almost always catch up with us and we end up with about the same amount. It is good to see Texoma rising, but now we are at the point where they have to start wondering if the marinas and campgrounds are going to flood. It seems like it is always feast or famine around the lake. So, you don't have much planted yet? Are y'all too wet? I have the whole front garden planted, but don't know how the lower portion without the raised beds is going to fare. It depends on how much more rain we get and on how quickly it comes. The back garden? Completely untouched. There's perennial herbs and flowers back there, but it is a muddy, weed-filled mess. I doubt I'll get it planted this month, but I haven't lost hope yet. It is reserved for hot-season plantings, including southern peas, okra, watermelons, muskmelons, Armenian cucumbers, winter squash, some summer squash and cucumbers, so I'd hate to not get those things planted. I still have time to plant all of them and get a harvest but the hard part is going to be just getting it to a plantable condition. If I can't get the back garden whipped into shape, I'll have to wait and plant the hot season crops as succession plants in the front garden after all the cool-season crops are harvested. That's not ideal, but it might be the best I can do with the sort of weather we are having. At this point maybe we all should be planting water cress and rice. We had a lot of street flooding in town and cars washing off roads and into ditches and such last night, and I just want to say that it is hard to feel sympathy for ANYONE who drives around a barricade and deliberately drives into a flooded roadway. Barricades exist for a reason. At least one roadway in Love County is closed until further notice because the road washed out. Down in the Valley View and Sanger area where they had the tornadoes and other severe weather to our south, a train derailed off the railroad tracks. Someone sent me a photo of it, but I haven't seen the news so don't know if that train was blown off or washed off or what. In the photo I can see train cars piled on top of train cars but don't know if the piling was from the force of the derailment or if weather "helped" create that mess. Okay y'all, we can keep talking about the weather and its effects on our homes, yards and gardens on this thread all day, but y'all know I will go and start a Friday Check-In Thread later this afternoon. If you aren't watching the weather to our west/southwest, there's already a Tornado Watch active in west Texas for a whole bunch of counties in the area covered by the NWS-San Angelo and NWS-Lubbock. I haven't looked at the radar yet to see if the party has started, but once it starts, those storms could roll towards SW or W OK. What are we going to do if we can't spend the weekend out in our yards and gardens???? I'd rather be out there in the yard or garden doing chores---mowing, edging, pruning, weeding, anything.......and instead we'll likely be inside watching the radar and running to our storm shelter locations and hoping to escape further damage. Rainfall is good but too much at one time is not, and it seems like we are only getting the kind of rain that is accompanied by severe weather this spring. Whatever happened to a nice, slow, kind, gentle, easy-going spring rainfall? I hope the western OK lakes are able to refill the way the ones in central and eastern OK are. The Red River is looking bigger and crazier every day now. Dawn

Amy, Same thing here with current prom pictures. No one back in our day (I was a senior in 1977) would have been allowed in the door with the exposed flesh I see nowadays. Sometimes I wonder what the parents are thinking, letting their daughters dress in such skimpy prom dresses. Waves of nostalgia can be fun. When I am visiting my mom at our childhood home, I am nostalgic for certain things....the roses Daddy used to grow along the backyard fence, the big mimosa tree we played beneath while hummingbirds and butterflies visited its flowers, the roses, peonies, zinnias, cosmos and cockscombs that mom and I (okay, mostly I) grew in my mom's flowerbed by the porch, the fruit trees in teh back yard and the veggie garden. All of those are gone, but I can close my ends and practically see them, and all of us out and about and near them, when I am at mom's house. Then I walk into the house and wonder how in the world my parents raised 4 kids in a small 3-bedroom house with only 1 bathroom and a tiny galley kitchen. The miracle is that no one died in the perpetual fight to get into the bathroom at peak periods. The house always seems smaller than I remember it being, but I guess that's the difference in looking at things as an adult versus how you thought they were when you were a kid. Melissa, The more I eat hot peppers, the more heat I can handle but I am mostly careful to avoid overdoing it. There's plenty of time to plant habaneros. They really thrive in warm soil and hot air so I never put them in the ground as early as the rest of the hot peppers. Bon, The only thing I don't like about potatoes is digging them, but the digging is a necessary evil that makes eating them possible. Jay, It is about time the snow is gone! I am glad you're getting to plant. We only had really good rainfall here in January, so it is long gone. Otherwise, our rain has been sporadic. It keeps missing us (uh oh, had summers like that before, haven't we, and you as well), going around us, just flat out not falling, etc. Our forecast highs also have consistently run 4 to 6 degrees above whatever the forecast says. Yesterday the forecast high was 80 and we hit 86. I'm starting to dread the summer weather since we are trending hotter and drier than forecast. Our back garden in the sandier soil does drain too quickly, but our front garden drains too slowly......if only I could take a gigantic mixing bowl and mix together the clay from the front with the sand from the back. Dawn

Amy, That's a lot of rain. I know you'd share if you could. It is so discouraging to see the rain do everything in its power to avoid us. I knew the time would come when we'd be paying for all that rain we got in 2015 and the first half of 2016, and I believe it now is time to pay the piper. If I'd had as much rain as you, I'd definitely be spraying the fungicide. It is a whole lot easier to nip those issues in the bud early than to try to control them after they're widespread. Rebecca, I'm glad the Creole plant wasn't damaged. Tomato cages do provide a lot of protection and that's one of the things I like about them---the Florida Weave cannot and does not protect tomato plants as well as cages do. Michelle, I've seen those watering cans like that and think they are so pretty. Maybe the rain gods think your watering can is an homage to them so they've reciprocated by coming over and dumping rain on your plants. Usually, we can make it rain by painting the house. I think that's a lot of work though just to inspire rain to fall. Oh, and we just painted the house in, I think, 2014 or 2015, so it is too soon to paint it again (for which I am grateful). There are other ways to make it rain.....pour concrete, wash all the cars, clean all the exterior windows (especially the second story ones), etc. It will rain again eventually. Until then I am going to be grumpy. It is hard enough, as all of you know, to keep plants happy in June, July and August even if rain is falling. Without rain, it is nearly impossible, no matter how much you water. We have had a couple of young hens go broody. We let each of them set on a handful of eggs because they were so determined. It was sort of a waste of eggs---but at least we have two happy hens. Each hen hatched out one chick and then promptly abandoned the rest of the eggs. First-time mama hens sometimes do this---like they are so proud they hatched out a single egg that they forget there's 6 or 8 other eggs still sitting in the nest. So, we have a tiny new black chick and a tiny new white chick, both in the brooder together under a heat lamp to keep them warm enough, and their mothers are free-ranging with the rest of the flock today. There's nothing like th cheep-cheep-cheep of a little chick to start out the day right. Dawn