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This weather site is operated as an amateur weather station site and should not be used as official data. I make every effort to ensure my data is as accurate as possible but I cannot guarantee that the data meets the requirements of the Meteorological Office or other professional weather monitoring organisations.
Friday 09 October 2015
White Cloud
Friday turned out to be another lovely autumn day. Again it was a cool start to the day but even though it was less sunny than yesterday it didn't feel too bad in any afternoon sunshine.
I've written a few blog posts about plants attempting a second crop. These have included pears, grapes and figs. None of these attempts at second crops have succeeded.
Rose - White Cloud - 01 June 2015
While it's not a true second crop our rose White Cloud still has flower buds to come. It was in flower on the 01 June this year as you can see from the picture above. A few weeks ago I'm sure that there were no signs of any flowers to come and I thought flowering had finished for the year but I was wrong.
Today we have a couple of flowers out and plenty of buds. It's just a question of how long the weather will remain decent before the buds begin to rot rather than open. Still we can't complain when we have flowers at the beginning of October.
The forecast at the moment seems to be for high pressure to be in charge, possibly for the next couple of weeks, resulting in dry weather but with some pretty chilly nights.
Saturday & Sunday 10/11 October 2015
Coldest So Far
It was a dry weekend with Sunday turning out to be much sunnier than Saturday. Midday temperature were around average for the middle of October.
Early Monday morning has seen our coldest autumn temperature so far with the thermometer falling to 3.2°C or 37.8°F.
Monday & Tuesday 12/13 October 2015
Apple Harvest
After a chilly start it never really warmed up on Monday. We had some short sunny spells and it felt pleasant in the sunshine and light wind. Out of the sunshine it felt a little bit on the chilly side. In the end the temperature didn't get higher than 12.8° C. That's our lowest daytime temperature since the beginning of May this year. The average for the day was 8.3°C the lowest since the 02 May this year.
Tuesday was more or less a repeat but with less sunshine and a bit less chilly over night.
Over the last weekend we finished harvesting our apple crop. Well into summer I didn't think we were going to have very many apples. Having finished picking our crop I will have to change my mind as we've done very well.
As you can see from the table we have harvested seven different varieties of apples. I think my favourite tasting apple is Egremont Russet. For a small tree it’s managed to produce almost 11 kg or 24lbs of apples. Fiesta another small tree produced more or less the same amount.
When we took on the renovation of this plot we knew it had a row of cordon apples which we now refer to as our apple hedge. The trees are old and I think most gardening experts would reckon that they needed replacing. We can’t bring ourselves to do that and the trees are “pruned” in early autumn and left to do their own thing after that. They do get the treat of a codling moth trap hung amongst their branches.
In the table above we think our apple hedge includes Discovery, Golden Delicious and Worcester Pearmain. This year we’ve harvested 23.5kg (52.0lbs) with Golden Delicious producing the heaviest crop this year.
At the moment most of our apples are stored in the summer house. They’ll need checking on a regular basis and any apples showing signs of deterioration will have to be removed and used quickly or discarded.
I’d like to improve the air circulation around them a bit so I’m thinking of using some small pieces of timber to increase the spacing between the boxes. We haven’t the space to store the apples so that they’re not touching which would be ideal but as that’s not possible it does mean inspecting them more often.
We've already eaten lots of our Bramley apples in blackberry and apple crumbles. It will be interesting to see how long our eating apples will store in the summer house. They may need a bit of extra protection if any frosts are threatened.
Temperature and Solar Radiation Records from Monday 12 Oct to Wednesday (am) 14 October 2015
