Monday, 03 June 2019
Not Living Up To Expectation
The weekend didn't live up to its billing when it was predicted that Sunday would be our hottest day of the year. It wasn't and that hottest day of the year now stretches back to 24 April when the temperature reached 24.6°C or 76.3°F.
Temperature Records for 2019
What we actually got was a mild day with a strong to gale force breeze blowing, not what was required when young climbing French beans and runners beans have just been planted out.
Sunday Afternoon at the Allotment
You can see from the photograph it's not the sort of sky you expect from a day forecast to be the hottest day of the year. To make matters worse those dark clouds didn't produce any showers either.
It didn't stop us from making progress on the plot though with lots of sowing seeds, planting out and protecting crops taking place. Sue covered our progress on the plot last week in her blog post that you can read here.
We do seem to have missed any rain which has been around for the last few days. Whilst a wet day would stop progress on the plot, it would probably save us time in the long run not having to water newly sown seeds and young transplanted plants in order to get them established. Our weather forecast seems to always state that showers or rain will occur in the next few days which magically never materialise. Our forecast rainfall total over the next five days is around the 30mm or 1.2in mark which would ease our watering worries for a while.
Wednesday, 05 June 2019
Rained Off - Brilliant
Rain was forecast for the middle of the afternoon but, to be honest, so much rain has been forecast only for it to remain dry nothing could be taken for certain. Our runner beans and climbing French beans were ready for planting out and so we decided we'd head off to the allotment and see what we could do before the forecast rain arrived. By the time we arrived there were a few spits and spots of rain falling already. We decided to carry on. By the time we'd erected the bamboo supports and got the last of the beans planted it had started to rain heavily.
Temperature & Rainfall Records 04 June 2019
It was a case of packing up quickly and heading for home. It was the first time in a long while we'd been rained off at the allotment.
At least our runner beans and climbing French beans had been planted out and watered in even though it was raining. By the end of the day the rainfall had amounted to 14.2mm (0.56in) the second wettest day of the year only topped by 16 March 2019 with 14.6mm or 0.57in. It was our heaviest rainfall of the year with an intensity of 39.8mm/hr (1.57in/hr) at 19:15. Interestingly it's already double the rainfall we had for the whole of June last year.
It should be enough to keep the plot watered for a while and with more heavy rain forecast for Friday it might be an end to our long spell of dry weather.