It’s a few weeks since I last wrote a blog post, but one thing that hasn’t changed is that we are still waiting for some proper rain. June turned out to be another dry month with below average rainfall. It’s the fourth month in a row that’s been below average. We haven’t had a really wet day since the middle of February. We’ve had showers but not a large enough amount of rain to soak into the soil.

For the last four months, we’ve had around half the amount of rainfall we might expect. Over the last 13 years the rainfall each month averages out at around 50mm or 2 in. However, whilst some heavy showers have been around, we’ve missed them all. They’ve been pretty close. Last week we were heading home on the M1 motorway and we were only a few miles from home when we hit a torrential downpour. It was heavy enough to slow down traffic on the motorway. I reckoned it must be just what we needed to ease the dry conditions.

However, by the time we reached home, it was clear to see that we’d once again missed out.

Looking back through my records it’s the driest start to the year since 2011. So far this year we’ve had 233.0mm (9.2in) of rainfall thanks in the main to a very wet February. In 2011 we’d had even less rainfall than this year with just 195.4mm (7.7in) of rainfall.

It means we’ve been doing lots of watering at the allotment. I consider a good rainfall to be 10mm, a little under half an inch, which should be enough to run off the plant foliage and soak some way into the soil. The last time that occurred was in the middle of February. Even though we’ve had about half our expected rainfall for the last four months, it’s come in very small amounts and certainly hasn’t soaked into the soil. I’ve included a daily breakdown of the rainfall in June to show the typical rainfall pattern of the last four months.

However, no amount of watering seems to have the same effect as a good downpour. Now that harvesting is getting into full swing we are having to prioritise which crops get watered. Especially now we’re picking raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, gooseberries and jostaberries less time can be spent watering as berry picking is quite time consuming.

We haven’t watered any of the potatoes and these are now suffering from a lack of rain.

We’ll just have to settle for whatever crop we get. as we certainly haven’t time to spend watering them. We are prioritising beans, peas and brassicas along with courgettes and winter squashes.

The forecast for the next 10 days is for dry, sunny weather with the possibility of temperatures reaching 30°C (86.0°F) next weekend. There’s no rain at all in the forecast for the next 10 days so watering will have to continue.