Monday, 17 July 2017

Still No Rain

It's been a few days since I last did a blog post. The weather hasn't been very exciting, some sunny days and some cloudy, with around average temperatures for the middle of July. The only thing we haven't had is any decent rainfall.

 

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Rainfall Record Last 4 weeks

 

We had enough to dampen the surface last week but the only rainfall of any use as far as the allotment and garden goes was at the end of June. The dry weather is starting to have consequences at the allotment.

 

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Our Japanese Wineberry appears to have succumbed to the dry conditions and as far as we can make out has died. We both think we have given it some water as we've gone around the plot watering but maybe we are mistaken. It's a blow as it was only planted a couple of years ago and was beginning to be rather productive.

 

I've a little bit of software that works with the data from my weather station to estimate how much evaporation takes place each day based on temperature, wind speed and solar radiation.

 

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I've highlighted the two interesting columns. Whilst the rainfall for the month is 7.1mm (0.28in) evaporation is a whopping 42.0mm or 1.65in. Now I'm sure there's some errors in the way the evaporation is calculated but it shows the trend of how much moisture the soil has lost compared to the rainfall we've had.

 

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Tuesday, 18 July 2017

Blue Sky All Day

Tuesday was a lovely summer's day with blue skies from dawn until dusk and pretty warm in the afternoon as the temperature made it up to 25.8°C or 78.4°F.

 

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On Sunday we made some provisional plans for sowing some carrots and Pak Choi. One small bed was cleared of some seeded rocket and salad leaves but instead of digging over the ground it was given a good watering.

 

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I reckon the size of the bed is about 10 sq/m and I tipped 10 watering cans of water over the bed. Each can contained 10 litres of water. By my calculation that should be equivalent to 10mm (0.4in) of rainfall. At the time it seemed a bit over the top but the water disappeared into the soil and didn't leave any standing on the surface. I felt certain my rough depth of rainfall calculation was correct. Working in metric units the answer definitely had a one in it, just a case of units and had I got the decimal point in the correct place. We decided to leave the bed overnight and see if it would dig over on Monday afternoon when we visited the plot.

 

When we arrived on Monday afternoon things didn't look too promising. The sunshine had certainly dried out the top of the soil and it certainly didn't look like it had been watered copiously the day before. The sunshine hadn't baked the surface of the soil into a hard surface which was a positive sign. But then the intention was that there would still be some moisture underneath and the bed would dig over using our cultivator.

 

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I could tell as soon as the cultivator started working its way through the soil that the watering had worked a treat and the bed dug over very easily leaving a tilth that we could sow directly into.

 

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We managed to sow Pak Choi and a row of late carrots in the bed above. There will be some room for a few short rows of radish and one or two lettuce plants at a later date. Unless the dry spell ends though we will have to keep the bed well watered if we want the seeds to germinate. It's amazing how many cans of water are needed to replicate a decent day's rainfall.

 

Thursday, 20 July 2017

What Storms!

Social media and newspapers have been full of stories of potential and actual thunderstorms all around the country. Some places have suffered flash flooding. So, it was with bated breath that we awaited our turn. We didn't want the flash flooding or the torrential downpour just some decent steady rainfall to water the garden and allotment. I give you yesterday's rainfall details.

 

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Rainfall Details for 19 July 2017

 

We had to wait until almost midnight for a few spots of rain. To be honest it was a muggy day and late in the afternoon and into the evening it wouldn't have been much of a surprise if we'd had a storm but whatever heavy rain was around passed us by.

 

As you will be aware if you follow either mine or Sue's blog we've refurbished the perennial flower bed on the allotment. The roses in particular received some rough treatment as we tried to remove the couch grass and bindweed from around their roots. I thought that we had lost up to three of the five roses planted in this border 10 years ago. However, Baroness Rothschild has survived and is now flowering once again.

 

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 Rose - Baroness Rothschild

 

Elmshorn and Jacqueline du Pre have survived the refurbishment and are growing well. One called Evelyn has a few green leaves and we are hoping it will survive whilst the final rose Golden Wings is showing no signs of life at all and will need to be replaced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disclaimer

This weather site is operated as an amateur weather station site and should not be used as official data. I make every effort to ensure my data is as accurate as possible but I cannot guarantee that the data meets the requirements of the Meteorological Office or other professional weather monitoring organisations.

©M Garrett 2016