Sandy,

I would think that for some individual counties, maybe it is close to being the wettest summer on record, with the assumption that the records are kept for meteorological summer, which runs from June 1 through August 31.

The only rainfall records that I know how to access easily only show rainfall by the region on the part of the chart that attempts to quantify the rainfall for the period being examined and to compare it to past rainfall. Most regions look really wet for this summer, though there may be counties or portions of counties within any given region that has received considerably less rain than their region has received overall.

I'll link the page that shows data for this summer's rainfall and how it compares to the 30-year-average data. There's various maps beneath the chart that appears at the top of the page and they break it down to the county level in order to compare this summer's rainfall to your county's typical summer rainfall.

If this rain keeps falling in the same already-saturated areas, y'all may start growing webbed feet.

It is great that your blueberry plants are so happy and are growing so well.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Summer 2013 Rainfall

I don't like that map. We win the "Lowest Rainfall in the State" award. As if there would be an award for that!

Leslie

I just decided to delete what I wrote about the many problems I am experiencing due to the unusual amount of rain. Never mind.....

I do agree butterflymomok, I have about that many years living in Oklahoma too, I cannot remember that I have ever seen this kind of wet summer.

This post was edited by GreatPlains1 on Tue, Aug 13, 13 at 19:54

Leslie,

Well, y'all pretty much always have that distinction, except when the panhandle takes it away from y'all. I am happy for the panhandle that they have finally gotten some rain this summer. Almost every year they seem impossibly dry.

If it is any consolation, we're not far behind you. Parts of southcentral OK have had great rainfall, but mine is not among them.

GreatPlains, It is okay if you want to complain about the terrible side effects of too much rainfall. We understand. In its own way, too much moisture is every bit as damaging as too little rainfall.

In a way, too much rain is even more damaging than too little. You know, if you have too little rainfall, you can make up for it by watering (at least for as long as the budget allows), but there is no way to suck up the extra moisture in your soil so there's nothing you can do in a wet year but sit and watch the damaging side effects develop.

Dawn

Yeah, I agree with Dawn. I read what you wrote before the edit and I didn't see anything wrong with it. I may want rain, but I don't want as much as you've had. On my garden, at least.

It is pretty par for the course here, Dawn. If it was just my garden I was concerned with, I don't think I'd even complain because this is a pretty normal gardening summer here. But it's really hard to look at the rain all over the state and not here when we're under major water restrictions. We're still on stage 3, but if it doesn't start raining we'll be at stage 4 soon. Everybody just ship your extra water here. Problem solved for everyone!

Leslie

This has been my favorite weather summer ever...sorry Dawn, Leslie and Great Plains :) The rain has been spread out better than 2007 or whenever that rainy spring was that flooded everything. The temps have been heavenly.

My only tiny sigh is that my squash seeds seem to have rotted in the ground. A few other plants that dislike water have struggled, but that happens on a fairly regular basis.

Sandy, I am going to gather a bunch of my gulf frit cats and let a school in Edmond raise them. She asked if I had enough for four classrooms...yup! and enough passionvine for 100 :)

Thanks. I had second thoughts because I know we were desperate for rain in the life or death sense and I figured I sounded petty. I quit fighting against the dry hot summer problem in 2005 and started going with it by working up an entire landscape based on the principle of lean and dry, taking out everything that didn't do well in drought or needed lots of water. "Survival of the fittest". I have been collecting xeric plants and shrubs, many started by seed that were hard to find and those are now well established. So, its hard to see some of these die and others look so sickly or out of character.

I have to admit that I probably deserve this dose of reality since I had stretched it a bit too far with some specimens and it was inevitable that sooner or later we'd get rain like this. I was pretty much patting myself on the back for having a landscape that always looks great in the midst of drought without watering. Is this is my come-up-ance? But I did save drastically on water when it mattered and will in future. Still it hurts to see something nurtured from seed destroyed knowing I cannot just replace it easily. All in all, more things will survive than not, but "we" are not looking our best this year.

The bronchitis from the mold is something that is usually a seasonal 2 week problem in June and it clears up once we dry out. Not this year. I start to get better then we get another onslaught of heavy rain and it seems to be worse each time. I have no memory in my entire life of having this sort of rain in July or August consistently. The doctor said this is a big problem this year with a lot of people and he had seen many cases of it. I can smell the mold in many places outdoors when walking.

Leslie,

I hate that you are dealing with long term bronchitis. I suffer from bronchitis brought on by a bacteria found in dirt, water, peat moss, etc. When I get it, I am really sick for about 3 months. I caught it in January--resistance was down--and ran fever forever. I ended up at an Infectious Disease Doctor who ran tests and isolated the bacteria. I think the first time I had it was either 4 years ago, or 12 years ago. Twelve years ago they never could figure out what made me so sick. So now it hits me when I am really worn down. It makes you miserable. So I hope you get well soon.

I am wearing out trying to keep grass cut. With all the rain, the grass is out of control. The weeds are too, but I can't deal with them right now. Every time I go out in the backyard, the words to the song "It's a jungle out there", come into my mind.

Coming home this afternoon from mowing out at the acreage--a job that normally takes about 3.5 hours--for 5 hours today, I crossed the Arkansas River. I remember thinking earlier this year that it would take two year's of good rains to fill it. Well, it's full with just this summer's rain. It's running from bank to bank, no sand bars showing at all.

Sandy

Lisa, Don't be sorry! I am happy you're having such a wonderful summer. Oklahoma is a state of great extremes in weather from north to south and from east to west, and it would be a very rare year indeed if all of us were incredibly pleased with our weather at the very same time.

GreatPlains, Our landscaping in the yard is all xeriscaping. I'll water new plants the first couple of years to get them established, but after that they are on their own. It has taken years of trial and error to find plants that are happy in dense dry clay in a year with 18-24" of rain that also will tolerate perpetually wet clay in a year with 48-54" of rain. The list of plants that will tolerate both extremes is not very long, and as you can well imagine, most of the ones that tolerate both extremes are native prairie plants.

All my water guzzlers are grouped together in the fenced cottage-style garden where I grow fruit, veggies, flowers and herbs. That's the area I do water, and none of the flowers and herbs in there really are water guzzlers, but some of the fruits and veggies are.

It is hard to raise plants from seed and then to have either an extremely wet or an extremely dry year kill them. In a year like this, I can see where even well-drained soil might not drain well enough in areas that have had extreme rainfall.

I am sorry to hear your bronchitis has been so bad this year.

Sandy, The linked 30-day rainfall page I linked below is for you! I thought of you and your wet summer the minute I saw the "percentage of normal rainfall" number for northeastern OK, and the ranking as well. It is so high it is just almost off the charts. It may not have been NE OK's wettest year ever, but the last 30 days are record-setting.

I do have to say that we haven't had to mow very much this summer down here at our end of the state, and that's one job I don't miss. You have my sympathy. We had a very wet spring and early summer in 2002 that made it impossible to keep the grass mowed and by the time we could mow, the meadows were head-high. It was a jungle all summer, and we tried really hard to keep up with the mowing and just couldn't even do it.

It is great that the Arkansas River is so full. I hope it doesn't get too full and get out of its banks and cause flood damage.

Growing up in Texas, we had an old expression "it takes a flood to end a drought" and I heard it all my life, but don't think I ever really understood it well until we moved here.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: 30-Day Rainfall Accumulation

Dawn,

The humidity is doing much of the damage, leaves and buds get steam cooked. My drainage is very good, not from anything I did but simply because I live on a slope. My soil is sandy, I did add that, lots and lots of it. Its the best thing I ever did although many people adamantly disagree with this being a good thing to do with clay soil when I mention it. They start in on "NO NO NO...add organic matter". I did that for years but nothing made the dramatic difference like the sand did. I no longer get cracks when its dry and water soaks in quickly and deeply making for good root growth. Maybe it depends on the soil you start out with whether this is a good thing to do or not, mine was heavy on the clay side and the coarse sand really helped.

The plants near the bottom of the slope are the victims of too much ground water for the most part. I believe with so much soil saturation, it slowly drains that direction for days and the roots suffer as a result as if they are standing in water, same principle. Then it rains again. I have a Russian Sage down by the street and this is a plant I had always thought was indestructible, Mr Suckers-a-Lot. The thing is huge. Its not dead but its wimpy small and looks like a sickly plant which needs water.

Plants with too much water seem to always look the same as plants that are dying of thirst, ever notice that? I believe its lack of oxygen along with root rot damage and thats why some people end up killing plants from more over watering misdiagnosing the problem, inadvertently making it worse.

I thinned out some Little Bluestem out today. They were as tall as Panicum 'Northwind' except they were laying flat on the ground looking absolutely awful. The Panicum 'Northwind' is taller than me and then some. I cut back a Milkwort plant that was growing like a horizontal tree with a woody "trunk", if you held up one of the horizontal branches it was as tall as me and 5ft wide. I swear, it really is a Milkwort.

I have some kind of "triffid" native perennial on the low end of the slope that is as tall as the house, no exaggeration, very narrow and vertical while the ones planted higher up are about 2ft tall. I am waiting to see what it is, I can't remember the seed I planted but I must have liked it since I planted several. Its got white stems and smooth blueish waxy narrow lance shaped leaves, it looks sort of like a gigantic monstrous milkweed, quite sculptural actually except the leaves are alternate, not opposite, a mystery.

Plants that are supposed to be about 7" tall like Tahoka Daisy are 3 to 4 ft tall. The native Gallardia have been thickly loaded with bloom since spring but the desert marigolds, my best bloomers especially in times of drought look all dried out and scraggly.

I culled through the poor rotted hens and chicks today. Maggots were eating the rotten roots. But, the weather was fantastic and the humidity is down and we are promised a dry out period. I will remember this summer for sure. It has been great for rooting Lantana cuttings. I keep rooting more and more plants. The hardy ones here in OKC are Miss Huff, Gold Mound, New Gold, Carnival, Ham and Eggs and Horrida. Its been a great year for starting new plants right smack in the middle of summer (or endless hot spring). You take the good with the bad.

The year was 2007.
The flood was bad .
People may have died.
I had small pumps all throughout the gardens and basement for the water was 2 inches from my kitchen floor and 3 foot in my tomatoes.
Times where hard but that was my town's biggest
rainfall on record.
After that no rain not any good for years.
My micro region suffers so.
Tree

I think it differs by micro regions.
Kingfisher 10 miles away got 10 inches in a day and 25% flooded.

The year was 2007.
The flood was bad .
People may have died.
I had small pumps all throughout the gardens and basement for the water was 2 inches from my kitchen floor and 3 foot in my tomatoes.
Times where hard but that was my town's biggest
rainfall on record.
After that no rain not any good for years.
My micro region suffers so.
Tree

I think it differs by micro regions.
Kingfisher 10 miles away got 10 inches in a day and 25% flooded.

Seeker,

That had to be a hard time for you. Where the rain chooses to fall one can only guess and hope. Hope that they get rain or not too much. And now, it's hard because the rain refuses to fall.

Sandy

I remember that year very well. It was the year after the fall when I'd taken everything out and I started over adding lots of sand and just started putting in the xeroscape since we'd been so hot and dry in previous years and I was sick of watering with plants still looking bad. I had to go retrieve a lot of my sand with the wheel barrow down the street where a very large hole had excavated out since there were no roots to hold anything in. I paid for that sand and wasn't going to loose it!

Green/grey slime was growing in the cracks of the sidewalk which later dried out into some kind of gross curly ugliness I had to scrape out and there was lichen on growing on everything. It smelled like a fish cannery outside. Thankfully, my low water needs plants needing good drainage made it, but just barely. I couldn't believe my poor timing.

I just heard on the news the other night the Farmer's Almanac is predicting a "frosty winter with more moisture and colder". I hope its not another ice storm kind of winter.