Weathermania!

Mille Lacs has NOT recieved any heavy rain. Short little thunderstorms maybe once every 2 weeks. Last couple of days some gentle off & on rain but not a serious soaker.

Leaf color is showing way early from stress.

Lake is down a foot from where I like to see it.

As much as I detest snow I hope we get socked this winter.

IT'S RAINING! @ Mille Lacs!

Can you say fat cow on a flat rock!

No hard wind and the radar has the bad stuff farther south.

3 inches in a little over a couple of hours here with more lined up. Crazy winds blew branches down. Sump pump running like crazy.

Working in Shorewood today (side hustle), got the downpour. Stopped at Back Channel Brewing on the way home (about 10 minutes north of where I was working), and they said they barely got anything. Just a small sprinkle.

We’ve had eighteen raindrops in AV so far. A little thunder, a little lightning ?right now so hoping for more.

I think it's coming your way from the SW. That's the current path. Hitting the corner of the state now.

Nice Beerdarts reference

I can confirm that. We are under a flood warning now. Could get 2 more inches yet tonight.

Thunder now rumbling in the Tonka/Hopkins area. That slow and low rumbling. Something is definitely brewing again.

Witnessed today why you don’t want to be on a lake during a lightning storm. Saw a huge flash from inside the cabin the definitely hit water followed by some impressive thunder on a two count.

Send some here. NWS just went from 100% chance of 2" to 90% chance of .75"

I wish I could. We needed the rain as you know, but not this much this fast. ( but hey, as a farmer, we are never happy with the weather )

Incredible how it's been going around us all night. 1/2 goes North and 1/2 goes South. The little gap in the middle is us.

Same here. Thunder and some lightning, but no rain. It other words, a nice soundtrack, no substance.

We ended up with 5.1 inches for the day. Neighbor 2 miles south got 7. Appears the ground took it in pretty good. A few low spots around the yard has standing water. We luckily avoided the large hail and damaging winds. Did blow down some branches and I thought our flag pole was going to snap at one point. Time to explore the area to really see it looks like.

That is an incredible amount of rain.

To show how dry it is, there are only a couple of spots where water is standing in the ditches. Our sump pump ran for a couple of hours after the deluge, but not at all now.

Seriously, what does the NWS mean when they say 100% chance of 1-2 inches? To me, it means it's a lock. We got .1"

Last night at 12:20ish, we had an extremely loud clap of thunder that occurred at the same time as a bunch of lights turning on then off, ceiling fan stopped working, blu-ray player turned on, AV reciever and subwoofer turned on, printer turned on, wife's criket turned on, main thermostat reset, floor warming thermostat turned on, router reset... very odd. I looked around the house and didn't see any damage, so I went to bed.

Today I went out in the garage, and find the control panel for our sprinkler system in bits and pieces scattered all over the garage, and the AC Adapter plug-in blown apart with burn marks. The Outlet strip it was plugged into - still functions, that outlet itself still works despite burn marks all over it. Wow. So i go around the house, no visible signs of a strike. Then I notice a valve box cover broken in half with both pieces 10' or so away from the box itself. Inside the box a valve is completely charred...

So it hit the sprinkler valve (through the plastic cover somehow?), travelled through the wires to the control panel, exploding it. Then hit the AC adapter, burning and destroying it. Then went into the house and somehow damaged nothing else...

Very thankful, and counting our blessings. I have no idea how nothing else is damaged (that we know of so far), and a fire didn't start with all the kindling that is in and around our garage. So lucky we didn't lose anything else.

A new sprinkler valve and controller is going to be around $200 probably, when it could've been much worse. Is there anything else I should be checking?

Jebus! Glad you’re home and your family are ok.

This is amazing and scary.

https://twitter.com/drkimwood/status/1432137783502675971?s=21

NWS says 100% chance of 1-2 inches here, same as they said last weekend when we got .1. In other words they must think it's not going to rain.

We were supposed to only get about 1/4 to 1/2 today because they said it was going north. We are at 1.9 so far with more to come. Gives us about 8 inches in the last week

We left Rapid City to come home and i nearly had to pull off the road west of Chamberlain because it was raining so hard.

Now we are in Worthington and we went through a couple pretty heavy bands just a bit ago

City boy question for you [mention]frozen4champs[/mention] ..what is the dream weather for a farmer? I realize it may vary based on the crops you grow but in general how much rain would you like to get and how often? How about temperatures?

I will give you the general, short answer. In the spring you would like to have moisture in the soil when planting. This year the soil was too dry to start. You would then like a rain right after planting. Ideally, you would then love it to warm up and get about an inch a week through the summer. This years temps, even as hot as it was in June-July was perfect. But, with no rain, it was devistating. In August, we would love a nice shot of rain when the grains are getting their ears ( corn) and pods ( soybeans) to help fill them out, followed by a warm dry fall. The rains we have received the last week will help with tillage and make the soil softer and will help in the long run, but won't really help this years crops. This year was the perfect storm of the bad as it was a dry, cold planting season, followed by a hot, lack of moisture summer. The crops took a long time to emerge as it sat in cold, dry dirt. The lack of moisture also hurt the activation of fertilizer and spray, making them much less beneficial. There is a formula called heat units, but explaining that is for another day. You can check that out here-- https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/heatunits.html

We got .8 here. I didn't get to see it though as we spent the day at Goat Ridge Brewing in New London. :dup:

Hearing some rumbling, and seeing hints of a light show in the west metro. Whether or not it comes to full fruition, we'll see.

It just started raining like hell here…heavy and loud sounding.

Yep, the rain is missing me and hitting you, per Wunderground radar. No rain here at all. Just the sounds and sights.

It didn’t last too long here either…which is sad because I don’t think I've had a night all summer where I've sat on my porch and just see Mother Nature completely pissed off

Ditto. I'm either already asleep (and it happened in the wee hours of the morning) or Mother Nature decided to split off to the north or south metro, not cutting directly through.

Well we had a huge thunder clap and flash of lightning here that took out the power for about 15 minutes here. Some very heavy winds too.

The wind was nasty here in Mankato around 2:45 this morning. Neighbor lost a tree in his front yard, luckily I only lost a small branch from my tree in my back yard. Driving around the neighborhood on my way to work I saw a lot of downed branches and garbage containers all over the roads.

The rain and wind felt hurricane like here in the “Bermuda Triangle” aka Valley Park area of Apple Valley/Rosemount/Lakeville.

Power was out east and south of you. Lots of trees down around Farmington.

About 3:30 am our power flickered on and off a couple times but stayed on. I had no sooner reset my alarm than it flickered on and off half a dozen times before going out until about 7:30. It sounded like a little hail for a minute too.

I woke up to find three emails from spectrum telling me my service was out and a voicemail that it came back on. Yeah. Cause it wasn’t obvious. ?. Thankfully calls are muted before 9am or I would have been pissed to be woken up by an automated call when I already lost most of my sleep last night.

These emails are frustratingly needed. If you live in my neighborhood when cable goes out you have 5 people asking the whole neighborhood if their internet/cable is out and what happened. Repeated texts until someone finally steps up and calls Comcast to ask what happened. People have no brains anymore to figure stuff out on their own and need instant information.

Except the emails came three hours after power went out and the email/phone call telling me it was restored was an hour late. What’s the point then?

Saw now real damage. Just several trash cans tipped over and some trees missing a branch or two. My sister lives about 1 mile northeast of us and all she saw was the neighbors trampoline stuck in tree.

We had good size hail, and the wind was whipping probably 60+ mph when the storm blew through around 3:30am. Lots of leaves on the ground this morning from the hail, but I didn't see a single tree down in my neighborhood. I'm pleasantly surprised about that.

Lots of medium sized and small branches down in my area. One tree at the park by me got split in half but no big trees knocked down/fully uprooted that I've seen so far.

Sticks all over central Saint Louis Park thanks to our three huge maples.

Had a guy show me pics. of Fort Snelling. Several large trees were rooted... sad.

We had some very gusty winds here around 12:30. One report of 70+ mph. Pushed down some of my soybeans. Hail came 1st, but luckily little damage other than leaves from trees down. Had 6/10ths of rain ( that made it in the gauge ). It is amazing that when we begged for rain this summer, we got none, and now when I want to start harvesting soybeans we get some every 3 days. More in the forecast for Monday, but then, fingers crossed, dry for a few days.

Can you swath and combine soybeans like wheat and barely?!?!?!

Here in SSP it seems like a lot of people are without power. In our little neck of the woods we have power and rarely lose power. However the houses across the street are "newer" (built in the 80's instead of 60's) and they lose power a lot more often than we do.

I will have to combine in 1 direction in parts of the fields that are blown over. ( combine into the direction they are leaning. so if they are leaning north, I need to come from the north, otherwise if I come from the south they won't feed into the combine) Soybeans are much easier to combine when they are blown over, just takes more time. If corn goes down or is twisted, it is a nightmare.

Thanks... know nothing about harvesting corn or soybeans. Though growing up I had chances to harvest wheat and barely out in Montana.

No problem. I'm always willing to try to answer questions about farming. I'm just a small operation, so I'm more old school than some of the bigger operations.

There's a good size swath by Sanborn where the corn is totally flat. Gonna by a tough harvest for them.