Friday, 23 February 2018

Midnight Potato Rescue!

With all the weather forecasting attention on next week's anticipated cold spell, Thursday night into Friday morning sort of slipped under the radar. Half listening to the weather forecast on TV late last night I heard then give out a severe overnight frost but no temperatures were mentioned and the forecast was soon discussing how cold it was going to be next week. Out of curiosity I checked the outside temperature on my weather station. I got a bit of a surprise.
 Temperatures Records for 23 February 2018
The temperature approaching midnight was already well below freezing. I wondered how low it would fall if it was so cold already and would our seed potatoes survive in the greenhouse. After a quick chat with Sue, we decided it was better to be safe than sorry and nearing midnight I headed up to the greenhouse by torch light to collect our seed potatoes. As a temporary measure they were left on the kitchen floor overnight.
The temperature continued to fall through the night, eventually falling to -4.3°C or 24.3°F. That's our lowest of the year, and for the winter too, beating the previous low of -3.2°C (26.2°F) on 11 December 2017.

The forecast for next week remains cold with severe overnight frost and daytime temperatures struggling to reach 0°C (32°F) so we'll have to put our thinking caps on as to the best place to store our seed potatoes over the next week or so. We need somewhere light and frost free.

7 comments:

  1. Oh gosh, that was cold. Temp in my greenhouse got down to -0.7 but I did cover everything with extra fleece & I have my heated propagators on for my chilli & tomatoes. Hope you didn't loose any plants.

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    1. Down to -3.5 in the greenhouse. Haven’t sown any seeds yet. Next week looking even colder.

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  2. We are having record breaking cold temperatures, too, with the coldest expected tonight (Friday night- Saturda morning).

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    Replies
    1. We’ve got severe frosts and snow forecast for next week. Not the best of starts to meteorological spring.

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    2. I just read that our "cold" weather has the same origin as yours: the SSW, which you brought to our attention at least a week ago. This is the first mention of it I've seen on US weather websites. It's a very good article: See:http://weatherwest.com/archives/6119

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    3. Seems a SSW causes lots of weather issues. I see that the GFS and ECMWF models can't agree on your weather either. I thought it was only our fickle weather they couldn't agree on. So far cold here but no snow.

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  3. Awesome update thank for sharing Martin

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