I don’t think 2021 will go down in our records as a particularly good gardening year. It certainly finished better than it started. As you can see from the table on the right it finished in eighth place equal with 2019 with a slightly below average temperature based on the last 12 years.
The year got off to a bad start with a cold January, the month finishing with a well below average temperature. However, for us, it’s not a particularly important gardening month. At the start of our gardening year, both April and May are important months for sowing seeds and getting other crops planted out in the allotment. This year both months were much cooler than average meaning seed sowing and planting were delayed by three or four weeks.
For the rest of the year, most months finished slightly above their average temperatures but some crops just never caught up with that delayed start.
Our yearly rainfall was a little bit below average, based on the rainfall pattern from 2010. However, the start to the gardening year got off to a cold start in April, as I’ve already mentioned, and to make matters worse April was one of the driest months we’ve had with just 4.0mm of rainfall. At times it was difficult to decide if seedlings were suffering from the cold conditions or lack of rainfall. Following the very dry April came a very wet May as we went from too little rainfall to too much. It did give everything a good soaking so that when some warmer weather arrived in June things began to grow away very quickly.
Fortunately, June’s rainfall was on the dry side allowing ground conditions to improve following that wet May. Rainfall throughout the rest of the year was as you would expect with some months above average and some below but nothing deviating too much from average.
The late frost in April and May meant that our fruit crop this year was much reduced. We were lucky enough to have a few plums and greengages but many of the flowers must have been damaged by frost or there were insufficient pollinators around when the trees were in blossom. Our early flowering apple trees produced no fruit at all although our Fiesta and Egremont Russett trees flowered in late April and went on to produce good crops so it wasn’t all bad news.
Most of our vegetables produced some good crops but later than we would normally expect. I’ve noticed that our parsnips are much smaller than we would normally expect but they were sown several weeks later than normal and I’m assuming that’s the reason.
To sum up then, despite the late start to the season due to the cold weather, we had a pretty good season at the allotment with only our fruit the main failure due to the weather. Our new seeds for the coming year are ordered, it’s a pity we can’t order the weather as well.
