Friday, 03 May 2019
Maybe May Will Be Better?
April provided us with some lovely weather over the Easter holidays but the rest of the month wasn't anything special. Despite the very warm temperatures over the holiday weekend they didn't make up for the lower than average temperatures we had for the remainder of the month. In the end April's temperatures were below its recent averages. April did manage one record for my weather station though, when 13 April produced the lowest April temperature in 10 years falling to -2.6°C or 27.3°F.
April Temperature & Rainfall 2010 - 2019
April produced another month of below average rainfall. It seems that April has often turned out to be a dry month over the last few years. It's meant we've had to start watering on the allotment already.
Over the coming weekend the wind is forecast to turn into a northerly direction bringing with it some unusually cold temperatures for the beginning of May. Saturday and Sunday mornings are forecast to be particularly cold with the possibility of a frost each morning. We couldn't decide whether or not to try and protect our potatoes on the allotment. They are just beginning to send up their shoots which are easily damaged by frost. This has happened to our potatoes in previous years and while the potatoes always recover from the damage I've no idea if it has any effect on the eventual crop. It must at the very least delay the crop.
Potatoes Casablanca & Athlete
Our early potatoes, Casablanca and Athlete, were the easiest to deal with as they aren't planted through weed control fabric and some soil was earthed up around the freshly emerging haulms. Our potatoes growing through weed control fabric posed a different problem as it's not possibly to cover them with soil.
Trial Potato Bed
Fortunately, we had some old straw left over that had been used for winter carrot protection. It was all used up protecting as many of our remaining rows of potatoes as possible.
For good measure we covered our newly planted kiwi, Issai, with some enviromesh. Its new shoots were badly damaged by the earlier frosts in April.
Kiwi - Issai
It is just starting to form some new shoots and we didn't think it would like these tender new shoots freezing and might give up the will to survive altogether and so it got an environmesh duvet to protect it.
Unfortunately, it looks like that forecast of the winds turning into a northerly direction are starting to occur through Friday morning.
Above is the latest output from my weather station indicating the wind has moved into a north easterly direction. The temperature is getting cooler as we progress through the day with a low temperature so far of 5.5°C (41.9°F) at 09:20 compared with a high of 7.8°C (46.0°F) just after midnight. At 11:00 the temperature is 5.6°C (42.1°F) well below what we expect at the start of May.
Tuesday, 07 May 2019
Stuff Stopped Growing!
It was more like the Bank Holiday weather we expect yesterday. The forecast showers held off until the middle of the afternoon but like the last few days it's been on the cold side for the start of May.
Those temperatures forecast to fall below 0°C (32°F) didn't materialise although they fell low enough for a touch of ground frost on Saturday morning (04 May 2019). However, it has certainly been a cold start to the month and in the greenhouse germination and growth rate of seedlings seems very slow. I'm putting it down to the series of cold nights and not particularly warm days even in the greenhouse.
Savoy Cabbage - Sabrosa
Newly transplanted seedlings are being covered with fleece each night to hopefully keep them a little bit warmer.
Like it or not our sweet peas and leeks have been moved to the cold frame to "harden off" although I'm not convinced it's necessary as, through the night, greenhouse temperatures will not have differed much from those outside.
At the allotment we should be sowing seeds of our carrots and parsnips but I don't think germination would be very good with such low overnight temperatures followed by cool daytime ones. I'll wait a few days for the weather to warm up, hopefully next week, before sowing seeds of a couple of our main allotment crops.