It has been a couple of weeks since my last blog post and, during that time some parts of the country have had some wet weather, albeit in the form of heavy showers rather than prolonged spells of heavy rain. That’s not the case here where we’ve missed any heavy showers.

We’d normally expect about 50mm or 2in of rain in August so the blue bars in the chart above should be enough to make a full column of blue. As you can see, that is not at all close. With just a couple of days of August left to go, our rainfall adds up to 14.0mm (0.5in), and if you look at the table below that’s fallen as 9 rainfall events. Most of those have done nothing more than wet the leaves of plants rather than produce enough moisture to penetrate into the ground.

As you can see from the table above only a very wet February produced a month with above-average rainfall. Our total rainfall for the year is 278  mm (11in) which is 119.0mm (4.5in) below average.

However, rainfall aside, August has been a lovely warm month and it is going to finish up the warmest August I’ve recorded since 2010. Crop wise the dry weather and warmth have combined to give some really good crops and some almost complete failures. On the plus side we’ve had no problem ripening tomatoes and now have a freezer full of pasta sauce and frozen chopped tomatoes. We’ve also had the best crop of sweet peppers I can remember.

Despite the lack of rain, and our decision not to water the potatoes, we’ve had a really good crop of potatoes. The potatoes are probably a little smaller than normal but the skins are clean and there’s no slug damage at all, a real bonus. 

The main downside is that the ground where the potatoes have been harvested is so dry it’s too hard to dig over. Hopefully, we’ll get some rain so it can be dug over before winter sets in.

Our worst crops have been parsnips and runner beans. We just couldn’t get parsnip seeds to germinate. After trying for most of the summer we managed to get some seeds to germinate but I suspect they all germinated a little too late to produce a decent crop. I think the runner beans suffered from the exceptionally hot few days in July. For a few weeks after the flowers refused to set, and it wasn’t until the beans had reached the top of the supports and were heading back down towards the ground that any flowers produced beans. However, the beans didn’t really form properly and were more like the beans you expect when the plants are really past their best. It’s a bit disappointing, as these were one of the crops we’d kept well watered, so our efforts were wasted. 

However, despite a few setbacks our harvesting through August has been very productive and freezer space is now at a premium.

Having checked the weather forecast there is no rain forecast over the next few days, but there is some as we move into September. We’ve been here before though and by the time we get into September, the forecast will have changed.