The start of the weekend produced our first dry day for 14 days. We’ve had some amount of rainfall each day from the 8th to the 23rd of the month.

The problem hasn’t been due to excessive amounts of rain. Lots of the rainfall we’ve had has been as showers. It’s more the fact that the rainfall that has fallen hasn’t had time to dry up. I’m sure some areas will have had larger amounts of rainfall than us.

However, the downside is that we’ve swapped rain for frost. There always seems to be a downside to the weather as far as gardening is concerned. Normally, I wait until the end of February to move our seed potatoes from the garage to the greenhouse. However, the mild wet February weather persuaded me to move them a little bit earlier. I checked the forecasts and there didn’t look to be any frosty nights in February so I decided to transfer the seed potatoes.

You can see from the chart above, which doesn’t include the weekend’s weather,  that after a cold couple of days to start the month, we’ve had some very mild days and nights with temperatures well above what we might expect for February. It will be interesting to see if the purple line for February 2024 manages to stay above the red and yellow lines showing our mildest Februarys of the last 14 years. It has meant that our stored potatoes from last year have started to shoot as well as our seed potatoes for this year which were bought at our local garden centre in January. To avoid the shoots becoming long, leggy and useless, the potatoes need to be brought out of the dark and into the light.

I store our potatoes in the garage as I think of it as frost free although if we had some exceptionally cold nights that might not be the case. At any rate, I consider it much safer than keeping potatoes in the greenhouse through the cold months of January and February. On the downside, if the seed potatoes are left in the dark of the garage they will grow long and straggly shoots which I don’t want. I want them to have strong sturdy shoots when they are planted which will hopefully be in early April.