Monday, 21 January 2019
Tale of Two Halves
The weather has certainly turned much colder. It looks like it could be a month of two halves, the first half mild, and the last two weeks much colder. I was hoping that the change to much colder weather would at least get rid of the dull and dreary weather of the first couple of weeks of the new year, but we’ve unfortunately swapped the mild temperatures for cold ones and kept the dull and dreary conditions.
Temperature & Rainfall Records 01-21 January 2019
We visited Potteric Carr on Friday afternoon for a walk around the nature reserve.
It was a cold, cloudy day and any still water was still ice covered early in the afternoon.
There’d been some posts on Facebook showing some starling murmurations at the reserve. Thousands of starlings gather at the reserve and produce magical flying displays before they settle down to roost for the night.
Unfortunately for us they chose to carry out their display some distance from where we were standing but we still managed to get some photos and video of their display.
Monday, 28 January 2019
Looking Forward to New Varieties
Last week was generally on the cool side apart from Friday and Saturday which turned out to be much milder. We are now on a downward temperature trend for the rest of the month and into the beginning of February. There is the possibility of some snow this week, along with the cold temperatures, but the forecasts are far from certain about the snowfall.
Temperature & Windchill Effects 21-27 January 2019
Sunday was a particularly windy day with the wind chill effect making it feel bitterly cold.
We did manage to get a few allotment jobs done and Sue has covered most of these in her blog post here.
With the new season's seed orders arriving in the post, and a couple of trips to local garden centres to supplement our online orders, a start to the new gardening year has begun even if we haven't yet sown any seeds. Each year we like to try a few new varieties of vegetables to see what we might be missing. It does means that over the years we've tried many different varieties, with potatoes and tomatoes the most prolific.
I think we've tried at least 43 different sorts of potato varieties. These are the ones I have photographic records of giving a list 43 different types. This year's new varieties will be Athlete, (a recommendation by Bill's Allotments 2 Plots of Heaven) Rudolph and British Queen. At the garden centre we thought Premiere would be new this year, but checking back we grew it back in 2012. We're also growing some Sarpo Mira this year, which doesn't appear on the list, but I can remember growing them in the past. It must have been a good few years ago.
Our Potato Varieties Over the Years
Casablanca Potatoes July 2017
We haven't tried quite as many tomato varieties, 41 if the listing below is correct but I'm sure there will be the odd omission. This year's new tomato variety will be Albenga. It's an Oxheart type originating from Northern Italy and a recommendation from Roger Brook the "No Dig Gardener". We were lucky enough to be given a couple of ripe tomatoes last year and we thought they tasted good and decided to give it a go.
Our Tomato Varieties Over the Years
Moneymaker Growing In 2011
Now I can't finish on tomatoes without mentioning our own record breaking tomato. Back in 2009 we grew some Brandywine tomatoes one of which grew to what we thought was an enormous size. We decided to make a YouTube video of this tomato being picked and sliced for sandwiches and called the video "A Monster Tomato". I know it's ten years ago now since we uploaded the video but since then it has had a staggering 206,000 views!. That's easily our most viewed video. I've added the video below just in case you are one of the few gardeners who hasn't seen it.
We now have some sharper scissors but I think the bread knife is still going strong.
Wednesday, 30 January 2019
Snow - No Show
The snow forecast for Tuesday afternoon and evening didn't show up. We had a few very light rain showers through the afternoon and evening amounting to 1.0mm in total so had it been snow it would only have been a light covering. It's continued cold though, with the wind chill effect making it feel even colder.
Temperature & Wind Chill Records 28-30 January 2019
The weather models seem to have had a rethink about the snow forecast for Thursday and that now appears to have done a disappearing act as well.
It was frosty overnight, Tuesday into Wednesday morning, and it looked as though we'd had the tiniest amount of snow when I ventured outside to thaw out the bird bath and top up the feeders.
The forecast is for the weather to remain cold for the rest of the week and through the weekend before turning milder next week.