Monday, 02 July 2018
Hottest and Driest
If you've read any of my blog posts over the last month you will not be surprised that June 2018 turned out to be the hottest and driest June I've recorded in the last eight years. Surprisingly, it's only turned out to be the hottest by the narrowest of margins as you'll see in the table below.
Average Temperatures June 2010-2018
Looking through the daily temperatures even though we've had some hot days overnight the temperature has fallen down to 10°C (50°F), or even slightly lower, which is below average for June.
However, June has also turned out to be a very dry month with really no useful rainfall at all. The total for the month amounted to 7.8mm (0.31in) but even that fell in several small amounts and didn't do any good in the garden or allotment. It was the third driest month of the last eight year and it followed on from a very dry May which is just off the table below in eleventh place with 18.2mm or 0.72in. To put these two months into perspective we'd normally expect around 100mm or about 4in of rainfall over this period.
Driest Months 2010-2018
That lovely lush green landscape we had in the middle of spring has disappeared and been replaced with landscapes that wouldn't look out of place at the end of a long hot summer. Most of our grass paths at the allotment and lawn at home are now a golden brown and needing some rain to freshen them up. No doubt once the rain comes it won't know when to stop but for the moment we've forgotten what wet weather is!
It's all meant lots of watering at the allotment in an attempt to keep things growing but at least now we are beginning to harvest some fruit and vegetables which makes the effort worthwhile.
The weather models don't suggest that the weather pattern is about to change anytime soon. The current forecast is for the dry weather to continue for another two or maybe three weeks although there is the possibility of thunderstorms cropping up on some days.
Friday, 06 July 2018
What To Do First? - Water or Pick
We headed to the allotment on Thursday afternoon. To be honest we weren't sure what was going on as these big black things in the sky had blotted out the sunshine. Was the world coming to an end?
Seriously though when we got to the plot we didn't know whether or not to begin by watering plants or picking fruit.
We've heard that those big black clouds can act as giant watering cans if you're lucky enough to get the right sort of black clouds which we were kind of hoping that these were to save us some time doing this.
So on the grounds that it would be better to pick some fruit first, thinking it might get wet in the rain, we set about picking raspberries, jostaberries, blueberries, gooseberries and a few strawberries for good measure.
We left the plot at just after half past six and the clouds had more or less cleared away and the rain had never arrived. There's always another day.
An odd weather record I noticed this morning is that July 2018 is the driest start to July in the last eight years for us. In all the previous eight years we've had some measurable amount of rainfall in the first four days of the month.