Wednesday remained dull all day. At times the cloud was thick enough to produce some light rain although it was never heavy enough to do any good as far as watering the garden and plot goes.
There was enough to wet the leaves of plants but not the soil surrounding them.
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| Temperature & Rainfall Records 01-30 May 2018 |
The rain scale of 50mm or 2in represents an average month's rainfall so it's certainly been a very dry month.
As May comes to an end so does meteorological spring and what a spring it's been. I keep all my blog photos archived by year and season, for example spring 2018, and each time I add a new photo to my blog I see the first few photos I used for my first blog posts of spring.
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| Archive blog photos - Spring 2018 |
As I add photos to my last blog posts in May this window opens reminding me of the very cold and snowy start we had to spring. After a dry February, March turned out to be very wet with a mixture of snow and rain on top of some very cold days and nights. April started off very wet with almost a month's rainfall on the second day of the month, and a bit more snow, adding to the problems caused by an extremely rainy March.
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| Snowfall - 02-April-2018 |
Then the weather changed and rather than record cold or wet we were talking record hot days as the temperature hit 28.8°C or 83.8°F making it one of the hottest April days on record. Blossom on our fruit trees started to open and we had a real treat as all our fruit trees produced the most blossom I can remember.
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| Plum Blossom - 21-April-2018 |
What we didn't appreciate as April drew to a close was that we weren't going to get much rainfall all the way through May. After complaining that we couldn't get any planting done because the ground was so wet we were about to encounter the exact opposite where sowing and planting was difficult because the ground had become so hard due to the lack of rainfall. We even got to air our views on BBC Radio Leeds.
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| BBC Radio Leeds Visit 26-April-2018 |
For most of May the weather has been hot and sunny and there's little doubt this May will turn out to be one of the warmest on record. However, it's also been a very dry month and we've found getting crops into the ground very slow and the more crops that are sown and planted the more watering there is to do.
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| Still To Be Dug 28-May-2018 |
Our roses are coming into flower on the plot and early indications are that, like the fruit blossom, they intend to put on a fantastic display.
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| Rose - Jacqueline du Pre |
As meteorological spring moves into summer there doesn't seem to be any great change in the weather forecast for the first few days of June. Hopefully we will start to harvest a few more crops as we move into summer as spring has been limited to rhubarb, a few herbs and cut flowers.
How long will this spell of mostly fine sunny and dry weather continue?
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Thank you for sharing Martyn and blessing to you both
ReplyDeleteSo when was your last frost date?
ReplyDeleteDidn't spot your comment now blogger doesn't want to be bothered to inform me when someone comments on a post.
DeleteOur last below 0C was 29 March with -1.8C. Our last below 3C date was 18 May with 2.2C.
DeleteI see RBGE have now updated for May. They report grass frosts on 1st and 14th May (and two flat zeros on 3rd and 18th). Our back garden is a bit warmer than the open area where the RBGE weather station is and we didn't experience any frost at all! See link to RBGE chart for May:
http://www.rbge.org.uk/assets/files/science/Weather/2018/2018_05.pdf