Saturday, 07 October 2017
A Rare Harvest - Melon "Emir"
The first week of October hasn't been too bad weather wise. Temperatures have been a little above normal mainly thanks to some mild night time temperatures rather than high daytime ones. Early Friday morning was the exception with the temperature dropping to 5.7°C or 42.3°F.
Temperature & Rainfall Records 01-06 October 2017
Friday was then the sunniest day of the week and as forecast it turned out to be dry too. The rainfall wasn't as bad as my chart makes out as it only amounts to 5.6mm (0.22in) for the week.
We decided to harvest one of our melons which have been growing, through the summer, in our greenhouse at home. The variety is called "Emir". Although the plants produced plenty of flowers they were reluctant to set any fruits.
Melon - "Emir"
We had three plants growing in the greenhouse but only one appears to have produced any fruit or at least I haven't managed to see any yet amongst the tangle of foliage.
To mark the very rare occurrence of having a melon to pick, I decided to make a short video of the special event.
We've still got at least two smaller melons to try.
Monday, 09 October 2017
Fine Weather For Harvesting
We've managed three dry days in a row and it's remained on the mild side for early October. On Sunday we were lucky enough to get the offer a trip to the allotment and back from our plot neighbour Jan.
To say the plot has been neglected for the last month it's not looking too bad. We've had a few visits, one each week, thanks to friends. On each of these visits we've concentrated on harvesting fruit and vegetables rather than any other jobs that needed doing.
One of the main catching up jobs will be strimming our grass paths. With plenty of rainfall in September the grass has grown well over the last month and is now pretty long. It will be a test of my strimmer.
Besides picking more apples and harvesting a few vegetables I managed to tidy up our collapsed runner beans. These were pulled off the supporting canes and piled in a heap ready for composting. As I had expected all the supporting canes had been snapped at ground level so that's 30 replacement canes required for next year. The lengths of broken canes will be fine for other jobs around the allotment but won't be long enough for runner beans supports.
Our Clapton cauliflowers had past their best and blown. Our irregular visits meant that we hadn't visited at the right time to harvest them.
There was nothing for it but to chop them up and add them to the heap of runner bean stems waiting to be composted.
Thursday, 12 October 2017
Gales Forecast?
The forecast is for a very mild but wet and windy Friday with similar conditions through the weekend. The last couple of days have been mild and a bit breezy. We had some heavy showers on Wednesday afternoon and into the early evening but nothing like the amount suggested by the weather forecast.
Temperature & Rainfall Data 09-11 October 2017
We did have some excellent news on Wednesday. At my hospital appointment, I was told that I could resume driving. It’s been a month and a few days since I had to stop driving but it’s seemed far longer than that. I’ll be less likely to complain now when I can’t get past a bus picking up passengers at a bus stop.
We’ve quite a backlog of jobs to do. All those simple jobs that just involved a quick journey by car tend to be put off when it involves a bus journey or two. We need some bags of compost from the garden centre. It's not an easy job to accomplish using public transport.
Once those jobs are done we can turn our attention to the allotment. There’s plenty of grass cutting to be done which will keep me busy for a little while.
On our last visit to the plot I made a video of our first carrot lifting session of the autumn.
I might be tempted to try lifting a couple of parsnips soon even though we haven't had a frost which is supposed to make them sweeter.
Friday, 13 October 2017
Record Late October Warmth?
It's forecast for us to have some very mild temperatures for mid October over the weekend and possibly the start of next week. Over the last seven years we've had a couple of occasions when the temperature made it into the low twenties centigrade or above about sixty eight Fahrenheit. These were both in 2014 when we managed 20.0°C (68.0°F) on 18 October and 20.2°C (68.4°F) on 28 October that year.
I haven't recorded any higher temperatures than these later in the year.
I’ve posted this blog post late on Friday morning and although it's cloudy and breezy the temperatures a very mild 18.9°C or 66.0°F. Will we break my record?