Cold Daytime May Day

Wednesday produced the coldest daytime high I've recorded since 2010. The thermometer struggled up to 8.6°C (47.5°F) at 13:10 taking over the record from 19 May 2012 which stood at 8.7°C or 47.7°F.

Temperature & Rainfall Records for 08-May-2019

To accompany the low temperature we had some rainfall throughout the day. It was never really very heavy and amounted to 5.6mm (0.22in)  by the end of the day. We're up to 22.8mm (0.9in) of rainfall already this month, more than we had in the whole of April. The rain, at any rate, will be good for the garden and allotment although the cold weather isn't.

This May is the second coldest I've recorded at this early stage of the month. May 2012 was particularly cold early on but it did go on to warm up later in the month.

The graph above is a bit messy but it is intended to highlight extremes rather than the conglomeration of lines in the centre of the chart. As you can see the purple line representing this year's average temperature only has the red line of May 2012 below it. Hopefully, this year will warm up too.

We did have a visit to the plot on Tuesday to check if our frost protection had worked. Nothing seemed to have suffered and even the flowers on our strawberry plants hadn't been caught as they didn't have a black centre.

 Strawberry - Sweetheart

However, at least one of the weather models is predicting temperatures down to freezing before this cold spell ends so we are not out of the woods just yet. We're keeping our fingers crossed though, especially for the strawberry flowers as unlike the potatoes they definitely won't recover from any frost damage.

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett