Friday, 22 September 2017
A Rain Free Day At Last!
It took the official start of autumn to bring our long spell of consecutive rain days to an end.
Temperature & Rainfall Details 29 August - 22 September 2017
Thursday was our first rain free day this month although in truth it wasn't much of a day. As the last couple of days of August were wet too that's a total of 22 consecutive days with some amount of rainfall. I can't find anything close to that in my eight years of record keeping.
There wasn't any sunshine on Thursday and it threatened to rain for much of the day. It wasn't until late evening that the clouds began to break up leaving the skies clear overnight.
The clear skies resulted in our lowest temperature of the month as the thermometer fell to 4.5°C (40.1°F) by dawn on Friday.
Friday has started off as a lovely sunny morning with clear, blue skies but there's a distinctly autumnal feel to the morning.
Monday, 25 September 2017
Pond Watercress - A Lettuce Substitute?
The weather over the weekend wasn't too bad with Sunday the brighter and milder of the two days. The temperature on Sunday made it up to 19.7°C (67.5°F) a little milder than the average for late September. It's only the third time this month the temperatures managed to creep above that expected average.
Now I know it's not a difficult crop to grow but I always seem to find it difficult to keep a successional crop of lettuce going through the season. I'm usually alright with the first crop of the year. They'll get plenty of attention and more than likely be planted up to grow on and mature in our raised bed at home.
Early Lettuce Crop in Raised Bed
It's after that first crop that things go downhill. I forget to sow some more seeds, the seeds germinate only to be eaten by slugs, young plants dry out if we get a sudden spell of hot weather or if they manage to survive all these stages they get infested with whitefly or greenfly.
In late spring Sue suggested planting a sprig of watercress we'd bought from the greengrocer in the pond. Neither of us had any idea whether the watercress would grow or if it did would it be eaten by the fish in the pond. Anyhow, Sue first rooted a sprig of watercress in a jar. (Sue posted details here). It soon produced a mass of fine white roots and we decided we'd move it to the pond. I sunk a spare pond planting basket in a shallow area and the rooted watercress sprig was placed in the basket. The lip of the basket was above the water level so the watercress wasn't able to float anywhere it wanted.
Initially the sprig didn't do much growing and looked like all it was going to do was produce some flowers and die off. Then, without us really noticing, it took off, initially growing out of the pond and over the path in front the summerhouse. As it grew some had to be trimmed back to keep the path free. This still left us plenty of watercress to be used as a lettuce replacement in lunchtime sandwiches as required.
It's now given up trying to take over the path to the summerhouse and decided to try for pond domination instead. I've removed lots to the compost heap. By lots I mean bucket loads.
A lunch time sandwich usually involves a fresh tomato and cucumber from our home greenhouse and some super fresh watercress from the pond.
Now we're wondering if the watercress will survive overwinter in the pond or will we have to splash out and buy a bunch of watercress from the greengrocer next spring and start the process all over again.
Tuesday, 26 September 2017
Made It To The Plot
Monday morning was misty and wet with some rain but the afternoon was a little bit brighter and drier.
We managed a visit to the plot last Friday to do a little bit of harvesting. I made a short video of our visit.
Thursday, 28 September 2017
Another Plot Visit
Wednesday night into Thursday morning was our wettest spell of what has turned out to be a pretty wet September. We had 12.4mm (0.49in) of rainfall in total overnight bringing our monthly total up to 71.2mm or 2.8in. Our monthly average for September is 41.7mm or 1.64in so we're heading for double our average rainfall for the month.
Rainfall September 2017
After a rather cool spell through much of the middle of the month, the last few days have been milder with temperatures around average rather than below it.
We had the offer of a lift to the plot and back home again this week, so on Tuesday our friend Graham gave us the chance to do a little bit more harvesting.
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A full list of what we managed to harvest can be found here.
We'd bought some autumn and winter cropping brassicas from D T Brown's and they were in rather desperate need of planting out. When they arrived they were potted into 5 in pots to grow on. They were ready for planting out some time ago but with our trips to the allotment limited they'd grown a little bit leggy in their pots.
I was on light duties again so whilst Sue got on planting out the brassicas I had a wander around the plot with the camera and tried to make a video of some of the bits that I missed on last week's trip. I did do a little bit of harvesting.
Saturday, 30 September 2017
Edging Towards My Wettest September
It's the last day of the month and if we get any reasonable amount of rainfall this September is going to be the wettest since 2010 when I started keeping records.
Temperature & Rainfall Records for September 2017 (to 18:01 on 29 September)
The wettest September I've recorded was in 2014 when we had 79.2mm (3.12in) of rainfall so as you can see from this months chart shown above we're up to 74.8mm (2.94in). There's certainly some rainfall forecast for Saturday, the last day of the month so we may beat that 2014 record.
As we haven't been down to the plot since Tuesday and at the moment we haven't got any visits planned. On Thursday during a spell of rather nice autumnal weather I made a short video showing inside our home greenhouse and summerhouse.