Thunderstorms came through Stephens Co. earlier this AM. We needed the rain, here in Duncan.

Of course, I'd watered the gardens, yesterday evening.

Over the last couple of years, I've lost too many plants by trusting the weather forecasts. If the garden needs water, I water it, forecast or not. Now that we've gotten the rain, I won't have to water for at least three days, depending on whether the skies are overcast or not.

They came through here too, but probably closer to 5:00 or 5:30 a.m.

We needed the rain too. I had just watered the new back garden yesterday evening because there's tons of tiny little new plants back there that weren't planted until latest April through latest May and the wind has been beating the tar out of them this week. I'll be glad when these plant babies are larger and can tolerate the weather better. We got almost an inch of rain, although there were two June bugs in the rain gauge so maybe the 0.9" would have been 0.6 or 0.7" if the June bugs weren't floating in the water.

I haven't been waiting for the forecasted rain to fall either with the young plants in the back garden. In the front garden where everything is older and more well-established, I've pretty much been able to wait for rainfall, at least here lately. Half of the rainfall we have had in 2013 has fallen only in the last 15 or 16 days, so prior to the beginning of this prolonged rainy spell, I was watering regularly. If I had kept waiting for rain to fall in March, April and most of May, my garden would be dead or nearly so.

The NWS has issued a Flash Flood Watch which is in effect from Wednesday morning through Thursday evening. Apparently they expect whatever rain falls from whatever storms occur to be more than the heavily-saturated ground can absorb.

The Flash Flood Watch includes counties from many parts of the state, so I'm just going to link the map so you can see if your county is included in the watch.

If I had a heavily saturated garden already, I would consider this really bad news. I know that for some of you in central and eastern parts of the state, the last thing you need is more rain falling on your garden.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Flash Flood Watch Area on County Map

Could flooding be the reason they blocked I-35 Westbound near Guthrie area today? I was sitting behind an over-wide load and couldn't tell what was going on, so I waited the 20 minutes until I got to the one man standing on the road telling everyone to turn around and take a different route.

By that time meeting my doc appointment was impossible and added to the frustration of other similar scenarios occurring on I-35. Seriously, I will never ever .. and I mean NEVER will utilize I-35 to get to Oklahoma City or any other destination past the Stillwater turn-off again. Maybe luck, but it always explodes on me. Five times in the last six years -no go.

But I've been trying to figure out why they had it blocked off today. There was no visual indication of anything.