momfryhover, Isn't it irritating to have rain miss the areas that really needed it? I always figured gardening in Hawaii might be difficult because of the pests and because of some diseases that thrive in high humidity. I'm sorry to hear that something ate your tomato and cilantro. It is finally raining at our house, though not heavily. I expect we'll get maybe a half-inch to an inch depending on how long the rain keeps falling. Tornado Warnings are up for some parts of AR and MO. Seems like March instead of January, but there's also a forecast for snow in NW OK, so I guess maybe we're having spring and winter weather today and tonight. I hope everyone stays safe from the severe weather. Dawn

Suzie, We have the grass fires sporadically, but yes, we are having them. Some years they are horrific and we have huge numbers of them. This so far has not been that kind of year. All of that could change, but the recent rains give me hope that we'll have only a moderate year.' However, most of the ones we've had have occured in only the last 2 to 4 weeks, so it is too soon to know if that is a long-term trend or a short blip caused by summer heat and low moisture. Sometimes, good rains in Sept. green up everything a lot and we don't see our fire season start in earnest until about Feb. or Mar. when everything is dormant and very dry. Sometimes our 'winter fall season' starts in late summer or early autumn like in did in 2005. Time will tell. I do not know why your sirens went off. There are many reasons they might. Does your dept. use sirens to summon their firefighters or do the sound them to alert y'all to threats....or both? Our depts. don't use sirens here because people in general in the rural areas are too far from sirens to hear them. We use paging radios that set off a specific 'tone' for each dept. and the tone is followed by the voice of a dispatcher. If your dept. were doing a disaster drill, I'd be surprised that they did not publicize it in advance so that the local citizens would not mistake a drill for 'the real thing' and become unduly alarmed. Around here, disaster drills are publicized in advance via the media. Are you near a lake or river? My other thought is that perhaps your fire dept. had the kind of weekend we had and perhaps was being summoned by that siren to respond to a boating accident, boating fire, or to participate in a search and rescue/recovery operation on a local body of water. It is, after all, a holiday weekend and the last holiday of the traditional 'summer' season, so lots of people are out on lakes and rivers and sometimes horrible things happen. I saw the tropical storm graphics on the news today and am thrilled Topical Storm Hermine is expected to send moisture across Texas and up into Oklahoma. We sure do need it and our plants will appreciate it, especially the unirrigated areas that survive only on rainfall. We really need a good rainy autumn all over this state. Dawn

Haven't been on for a while but wanted to see how everyone was doing after the big deluge. Anyone heard from I think Gloria? I seem to recall she lives in Longmont. I hadn't realized how bad it was until I was coming home from work last Thursday evening from Denver and saw the St. Vrain looking like a mini Niagara falls! running barely under I-25. Fortunately for us, we're on higher ground and they evacuated folks in low lying areas to the Mead HS and a church on Rt.66. The St. Vrain is still running high and heaps of streets East of us are still closed. I hope everyone is safe and not severely impacted and hope to see some of you at the swap which i see hasn't yet happened so I am hoping this time to make it since I always seem to miss the Fall swap and I am certain I have some plants to share. Here's a bit of a laugh and smile in all the gloom, the fella and I found this large toad that must have gotten disoriented during the deluge and fell into our window well we think....we haven't a clue how long it's been there but from the looks of it, he's doing pretty good feasting on all the crickets down there. We took him over about a half mile to a "swampy" area and hopefully he'd be happier there!

kfrinkle, The latest rainfall projections for your area sure haven' gotten any better, and my part of Love County is straddling the line that divides the projected rainfall into the 3-6" category and the 6-9" category. Looks like the frogs are gonna be really happy and the gardeners much less so. Lisa, I imagine he is right. This year it seems like Norman floods at the drop of a hat. I imagine there will be lots of flash flooding and a lot of good old river flooding over the next few days. We had flash flooding overnight in part of our county (but not our part as most of that rain missed us too). Paula, It needs to be a big boat so it will carry a lot of potted tomatoes and peppers. All this rain has severely watered down the flavor of both tomatoes and plums. I suppose the tomatoes still taste better than grocery store tomatoes, but only just barely. Now that the peaches are breaking color and approaching the ripening stage, this big rainfall is going to come along and water down their flavor too. The rain hasn't hurt the quantity of produce we're harvesting but it sure has hurt the quality. As soon as they do the weather here on the noon news, it is back to the kitchen for me because I'm making plum jelly today. I probably should be outside building a plant ark and loading it up with 2 plants of each kind.... This morning, I heard on my county radio that a small amount of water (at that point, 1" deep) had just begun flowing across the Lake Murray spillway at Scenic Hwy 77. Hopefully that runoff from last night's very heavy rains north of us won't cause enough water to flow over the spillway that they have to close down the road. There's also a possibility that Lake Texoma may rise enough again to flow over the spillway again. The spillway is at 640 and the lake level currently is 637.70. It has taken it a couple of weeks to drop from the former high of 645.something and now it may go over the spillway for only the 5th time in its history. We weren't expecting the fifth time to occur so soon after the fourth time. We're expecting 3-6" in much of the area, with some areas getting 6-9". That much rain over a few days will fill up the lake quite a bit. It is funny. I thought it was mid-June and we were in the process of recovering from all the May rainfall. Suddenly, we're almost right back where we started, as if the two weeks of drying out never even happened. I feel sorry for anyone near the lake or river and especially folks downstream as they are about to have water damage and destruction all over again. On the bright side, all the rain made really nice-sized potatoes and lots of them which is wonderful since drought often causes smaller yields and smaller sized potatoes. Dawn