Saturday 15 March 2014
Naff Weather Forecasting!
Saturday was a stormy day with gale force winds all day long. The weather forecast for the weekend was hopeless. The chat was of high pressure dominating our weather with well spaced isobars and the only doubt seemed to be about how much sunshine we would get. In fact the sunshine is a bit of an irrelevance as it’s been blowing a gale now since Friday lunchtime.
The chart above shows the wind speeds from Friday through to 09:00 on Sunday morning and apart from a short respite on Saturday morning the winds have been consistently strong. Sunday morning has started off particularly windy with a highest gust speed of 32mph unusually high for our rather sheltered suburban location.
In comparison with other March’s this is now the windiest and we are only half way through the month. I’m not sure when our gale force winds will ease as they’re not actually forecast. The last few hours have been as windy as anything we had through the winter -
I can’t see a weather warning for strong winds on the forecast for today. Perhaps it isn’t windy anywhere else?
Sunday 16 March 2014
Planning to Cheat a Bit
Most of Sunday was sunny but a gale force wind blew all day and didn’t ease until well into the evening.
I’ve decided to do a little bit of cheating in an attempt to get some early broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. Normally we raise our own brassica plants to grow on over winter and go on to produce an early season crop. For the second year in a row our plans have been ruined as two years ago pigeons devastated the crop and last year all our plants suffered from club root.
This is how our winter brassicas look now. The plants were left in the ground over winter hoping that might make a miraculous recovery. Obviously that hasn’t happened and a few weeds, ever the opportunists, have decided to grow in the holes in the weed control fabric that should be occupied our brassica plants.
On Sunday I noticed this on Marshalls web site. Now our last foray into plug plants wasn’t too successful as the plants received were pretty poor and nothing like the quality of home produced seedlings. However, beggars can’t be chooses, and this collection hopefully will produce much earlier crops than I’m going to be able to produce from an early April sowing. So they’re ordered and according to the information delivery will be anytime soon.
These brassicas will be planted out into one of the beds cleared last autumn. For the last twenty or more years, neither of these beds have been used to grow any brassica plants so should be free of club root. Since this photo was taken, the beds have already been covered with weed control fabric so there’s not too much preparation work required. The new plants will need to be protected by netting to keep the wood pigeons off.
Monday 17 March 2014
Blimey It’s Arrived
Monday was rather cool and cloudy but thankfully the gale force winds that had been blowing all weekend abated.
That long awaited polycarbonate sheeting that was ordered on 20 February was eventually delivered mid afternoon on Monday.
Inside this package are two seriously large pieces of polycarbonate each measuring 1800mm x 720mm. It’s bad enough handling polycarbonate sheeting this size but handling the pieces of glass this size needs to be done with extreme care. It will certainly be a tricky job getting the remaining pieces of broken glass out of the greenhouse roof. It’s a job I won’t consider tackling on anything but a calm day as hanging on to a piece of polycarbonate caught by a gust of wing is one thing but a sheet of glass this size is far too dangerous to contemplate.
The polycarbonate was well protected for its travels wrapped up in several layers of bubble wrap. I’ve checked it to make sure it wasn’t damaged in transit and both pieces are intact.
I didn’t want to waste all that bubble wrap as it will come in useful for providing plant protection during winter months. I was wondering how best to fold it up when I remember Sue had a long cardboard tube upstairs that some curtain material we had bought had been rolled on. It proved a really good method of rolling up the bubble film to be stored in the garage for later use.
Now I need a decent day to replace the broken glass with these new polycarbonate sheets and the greenhouse refurbishment will just about be completed -
Tuesday and Wednesday 18/19 March 2014
What a Mess!
Tuesday was a poor day weather wise. We did have a few sunny intervals but it was windy with plenty of short showers. Wednesday was much better with some sunny spells, a bit breezy but dry. It was time to repair our greenhouse windows.
All winter our home greenhouse has needed some replacement glass. Some glass was damaged by winter gales, some by last summer’s apples falling through the glass and some well it just sort of fell out through old age. That was the case with the glass in this window which has had a temporary piece of plywood over for many months now.
Once all the temporary pieces of timber had been removed it revealed areas of the greenhouse which had escaped last week’s “red cedaring” job. Touching up these areas was my first job but it didn’t get off to a good start as I inadvertently touched up the greenhouse path.
Getting into an awkward position to reach a difficult to get to timber section I sent my pot of red cedar tumbling into the greenhouse. It made a bit of a mess. Fortunately most of it missed me but I do now have a nice jumper with red cedar staining down the front. A bit of tidying up was needed before any further progress could be made. At this stage I think it would be fair to say things weren’t going according to plan. Still no windows replaced and the greenhouse path and dwarf walls stained cedar red for good. Well that’s what I thought.
Sue did a brilliant job of cleaning up the mess I left behind and the greenhouse isn’t going to bare the scars for ever. At least it didn’t go over our onion crop which was sitting close by. We could have had far more red onions than we bargained for.
Once all the mess was sorted it was back to fitting our new polycarbonate sheeting. As it’s tricky reaching parts of the greenhouse such as the window some careful thought has to go into making sure things are done in a suitable order. That meant the opening vent had to be repaired first and a suitably sized piece of polycarbonate cut from one of the old broken pieces being replaced.
I always expect polycarbonate to crack or split when cutting. It’s not a hard material but I’m never too sure I’m going to make a successful cut until the job’s done. There were no more mishaps and the window vent soon had a new pane of polycarbonate and a coating of red cedar. That just left the two extremely large panels to be replaced.
Our greenhouse now has some extra glazing bars positioned inside and outside the greenhouse to hopefully stop the sheeting from flexing during stormy weather and making a bid for freedom. Only time will tell. It will cut down on the light inside the greenhouse but that will be a price worth paying if the new panels are prevented from blowing out in windy weather.
Thursday 20 March 2014
Danger in the Air
Thursday at 16:57 was the Spring Equinox and the official start of spring in the northern hemisphere. It wasn’t however a very spring like day with strong winds from early morning getting even stronger in the afternoon. It did stay dry until the middle of the afternoon when we had some light rain. This didn’t come to any great amount just 2.0mm.
I had an e-
In the afternoon rain he took up a vantage point on our newly “cedared” greenhouse awaiting delivery. Sadly for him they didn’t arrive on Thursday and they may well spend their first week in the greenhouse recuperating from their journey before they are moved out into the cold frame where they will be protected by netting to keep Woody at bay.
Sue was a little concerned that Woody might be making a mess on our newly refurbished greenhouse.