I saw that the BBC and the Met Office were saying that this year was the driest start to any year since 1976. My immediate thought was that’s not been the case in our garden as measured by our weather station.

Now I’ll admit my weather station isn’t set up to challenge the Met Office. When I set up my weather station I wanted something that measured the temperature, rainfall and wind speeds in our garden basically so I knew what our plants were having to put up with. Met Office data often came from weather stations many miles away from us.

If you’ve watched any of my recent YouTube videos or read any of my recent blog posts you will know I’ve been complaining about the lack of rain for weeks if not months. I’d considered writing a blog post about this year being the driest start to any year since I began keeping records in 2010. The only reason I haven’t written that post is that it isn’t correct.

I was surprised to find that 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2017 were even drier than this year up to the end of June. The reason for this is that we had a very wet February this year with 115mm or 4.5in of rainfall more than double the average rainfall.

I’ve added my table of yearly rainfall totals below. It’s colour coded with darker shades of red representing dryness whilst darker shades of blue representing wetter totals.

I’ve added the rainfall for July up to the 28th of the month. At this stage it looks like in only 2011 will we have had less rainfall than this year unless we get a decent wet day before the end of the month and this year manages to pass 2017.

There is one thing for sure we need a really good wet day to sort out both the garden and allotment. The continual light showers do nothing more than wet the surface of the soil without penetrating into the dry ground beneath. The video below filmed when I dug up some Casablanca potatoes, shows just how dry our allotment is.