Monday 01 September 2014
An Unwanted August Hat Trick
After the hype given to it by the forecasters I was expecting a bit better start to September’s weather. Granted it’s a little bit milder but I was expecting some nice sunshine instead it was cloudy for most of the day. Still it stayed dry and the temperature managed to make it to 20°C so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.
The start of September heralds the start of meteorological autumn. Summer 2014 is done and dusted and consigned to the pages of the record books. Summer had been pretty good, especially July, but then August rather put a dampener on things.
August turned out to be a wet month. I didn’t have to spend much time watering the plots as we had 106.0mm of rainfall in the month which is more than twice the amount we might expect. It was the wettest month of the year and the wettest August I’ve recorded to complete part one of the hat trick.
As I’ve already mentioned it was a cool month too and we didn’t have any blistering hot days to dry out the ground.
So besides being the wettest I’ve recorded it turned out to be the coolest August too although 2010 pushed it very close as it was a mere 0.2°C warmer. Part two completed.
Then to complete the hat trick it was the windiest August I’ve recorded. This wasn’t close to any other year with several days of gale force winds.
Perhaps after the August flop September, and who knows even October, may be nice months to gentle ease us into the colder winter months.
Tuesday 02 September 2014
Going Yellow
Tuesday was a lovely sunny September day with a light breeze and the temperature reaching 20.8°C in the afternoon.
This year the tomatoes in our home greenhouse have been the ones to grow without any weird problems affecting them unlike last year when we had a complete crop failure. Our earliest and tastiest tomato has been Sungold. Our other tomatoes are now starting to turn, turning involves going from green to yellow, but this succession is more by accident than design.
I’ve labelled this plant “Kings of Colour -
The tomatoes above are Amish Gold and these too are fairly large tomatoes but not quite up to the size of Kings of Colour. Then lurking amongst the yellowing tomatoes are Alicante a much more usual tomato variety.
To further prove the point that I had yellow on the mind when selecting this year’s seeds for the greenhouse our first pepper to turn is Orange Bell.
This one is going to be our first ripe pepper of the season. It’s a large pepper for us, as normally we only manage to get fairly small fruits but this year we seem to have pretty good crop of large peppers. That little Sungold tomato, behind it, is there again to help size the pepper.
If you’re wondering what became of that little Sungold tomato, it didn’t make it out of the greenhouse. What better on a lovely sunny day than a tomato straight from plant to mouth -
Wednesday 03 September 2014
Calm
Wednesday was a dull but very mild day with the temperature reaching 21.2°C.
The weather at the start of September has been dominated by high pressure resulted in settled conditions. One feature, in marked contrast to August, has been the calm conditions.
01 to 03 September 2014 Temperature and High Wind Speeds
Tuesday’s conditions were exceptional in that the highest wind speed recorded was a mere 1 mph not enough to even rustle any leaves. It’s only the second day in my five years of records that this has happened the last occasion been on 21 March 2012. We haven’t had any days with a zero mph reading.
On the plot our strawberries Flamenco continue to make a case for planting them again when we plant up our new bed next spring, as an ever bearing variety.
Almost completely free of slug damage too thanks to the dry weather of the last week or so. A real bonus I think they’ve made their point.
Thursday 04 September 2014
A Little Sunshine Please
Thursday was a repeat of Wednesday. It was overcast and mild. The sun tried to make an appearance mid morning but it lost out in the battle against the cloud cover.
We spent part of the afternoon at our local RSPB Reserve at Fairburn Ings. The overcast sky tended to give a washed out effect on photos especially over the large lake.
Obviously the swans though the day looked better from under the water than above it. Most of my shots only needed a tap with the delete key once they were downloaded.
Probably my best shot of the day as little and large helped themselves to some peanuts.
Friday & Saturday 05/06 September 2014
Chalk and Cheese
Friday was a lovely sunny September day and Saturday in complete contrast turned out to be dull and wet.
As you can see from the above chart Friday was the warmest (23.2°C) and sunniest day of the month whilst Saturday turned out to be the coolest (16.5°C), dullest and wettest with 4.0mm of rainfall. In fact it was our dullest day since 01 May this year.
01-
In the fine weather on Friday we carried out some tree surgery to our Malus Profusion. The aim is to get more light to our back border so lots of the lower branches to the tree were removed. The tree isn’t an amazing specimen and has already shed many of its leaves and has been in autumn mode for a few weeks now. It always manages to put on a spectacular display in spring but then seems to struggle along for the rest of the year. It will be interesting to see how it copes with its latest pruning.
After lots of cutting and pruning on Friday my right arm was quite pleased with some rain and a rest day on Saturday.
Sunday 07 September 2014
A Visit to Boundary Cottage
Our topsy-
We’d decided to visit Roger Brooke’s garden, Boundary Cottage. Roger can describe his garden far better than me over on his ‘No Dig Gardener’ Blog so click here to read all about Boundary Cottage.
Sue and I took lots of photos of Roger’s garden, far too many to put on a blog. We’ve normally added extra photos to our Flickr accounts but yet again I’ve had trouble accessing my account and I have looked for an alternative hosting package. After some research I’ve settled on Zenfolio. We’ve both started adding our best pictures in a portfolio at http://sueandmartynsportfolio.zenfolio.com/. It will take us some time to master this new web site and complete our home page and get a suitable system set up to view our photographs. We don’t really want to wait until all our photos are uploaded as the process will be as long as a piece of string so clicking on the link will take you to our home page where you can view photos we have already uploaded. We’ll be adding some of Roger’s garden as soon as they’re sorted out.