Here, in Stephens County, I've reached the point where I'll believe it when I see it. I'm watering my garden this evening. Every time I've waited on the forecasters to get it right, I've lost plants and seedlings.

The rest of you folks? Be careful out there. Locally? I haven't seen a drop of rain in well over a month.

Since you have already lost some to hail, why don't you put something over your smallest plants for insurance. I saw your photo and I don't know how you would protect the biggest plants.

I didn't cover at all the last time it hailed and, as a result, I lost several plants. I've got a rudimentary cover up hoping that this will help. My yard doesn't get a lot of wind with the privacy fence, etc. and this same set up has withstood winds in excess of 35 miles per hour when I was using it as a freeze protectant.

If you ever wanted to see what 200 clothes pins looks like, there it is.

We've got our hail hats on here. Just hoping the wind doesn't knock the bricks off to shear off plants with flying buckets or falling bricks. Last year I caged at planting time and that helped the buckets stay in place when i needed to drop them on, but this year I thought I might need to be able to throw row covers on for freeze protection, so haven't put cages on yet.

Well, we actually got a bit of rain out of it, this time. Over the last month and a half or so, we've either gotten a few sprinkles -very few- or nuthin' at all.

Reed you need to hit the yard sales for cheap sheets and quilts. That quilt on this end is too good to be out in the weather. I don't usually buy used bedding but last year when I had four dogs and two cats, I bought cheap sheets and afghans at yard sales for dog beds. I have used the sheets this spring.

You'd never believe the story of that quilt, Helen. I was driving on US Hwy 281 and a truck in front of me was hauling some stuff as they were obviously moving. The quilt was being used to cover stuff and blew out from under the strap that was holding it down. I stopped and picked it up with the hope of finding them down the road to return it and ended up with a decent quilt.

As for hail damage, we escaped the brunt of the storm. They had 60-70 mph winds about 20 minutes south of here but it barely even rained here.

We got .78 inch of mail and most of it fell in a 15 minute period. The thunder woke me around 5:30, and about 5:45 the rain hit EXTREMELY hard. Some of my tallest potato plants were just laid over on the ground but I suspect they will stand up again when the sun shines.

My remaining transplants were outside on a picnic table and I wanted to go bring them inside but there was too much thunder and lightening and the rain was unbelievable. They look pretty good except for the few that were still in soil blocks. I had moved the blacks from around them to plant yesterday so the blocks kind of flattened out from the heavy rain. About the time the heavy rain ended and turned to a lighter rain event, the weather radio went of for Springfield. We never did get an alert for Oklahoma.

Larry, my tomato transplants were just about perfect except for the ones in the cups. Even with spending a lot of their life under lights, they were the perfect color and very lush, and none of them were leggy. The ones in cups had some brown leaves, more space between branches, a lighter color, and few roots. They looked as good as a lot of the transplants I have seen in stores, but they didn't look nearly as good as their neighbors in pots that had lived under the same conditions. It was weird.

The weather radio woke me up and I got about half my plants in the hall before the rain and thunder about 6:00 am. I got .15 inch yesterday a nice slow rain and .6 this morning coming down in buckets. The tomato plants are fine just a little water logged. I am going to just stick some more in the mud today. This preparing each hole is taking too long.

I have not checked ones planted in the garden yet. I had row cover over some to shade them as they are not hardened off completely. I hope the wind didn't catch it and hurt the plants.

Supposed to storm again and we didn't even get any rain. Well, the covers come of the plants this morning. Flowers are starting to show. I'm a bit excited.