It's the end of the first week of lockdown. The weather at the start of the lockdown was really good. It was the first time since the end of September that we'd had anything like a decent day's weather as the temperature soared to a little over 19°C (66°F) and the sun shone.
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| Temperature and Wind Chill Records 21-30 March 2020 |
It's the first time since last September we've had a whole week without any rain. Looking back through my rainfall records, I'm surprised that I have to go back to 18-24 May 2019 for the last time we had a week without any recorded rainfall. Rather amazingly, we've now had 10 dry days in a row. Last year we had 19 dry days in a row from 05 to 23 April leaving us with a few days to go to match that record.
However, there's been a definite change in the weather over the last week. Although it's remained dry the wind has moved into a north or north easterly direction turning the weather much colder, with Saturday and Sunday feeling particularly cold with the wind chill.
Gardening wise things are very much on hold due to both the weather and Covid 19. Whilst the vast majority of our seeds were ordered online at the beginning of the year, I tend to buy in compost as I need it for sowing seeds and potting on plants. As a result of Covid 19 that leaves us with a very limited supply of compost as all garden centres are closed. I'll have to consider carefully the seeds we should sow and how they will be potted on. At the moment I think I'll leave sowing any seeds at all until some milder weather returns.
Suggestions at the government Covid 19 briefing yesterday were that social distancing measures might need to be in place for the next 6 months. Life, as we used to know it, has changed completely with little hope of it returning to anything like normal in the near future. Hopefully, when the lockdown measures are reviewed in another 2 weeks they will have had some effect on the spread of the disease and at least these measures will be relaxed slightly.
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I read that seed companies are inundated with internet orders as people hit upon the idea of growing their own. As for compost, provided you are up to visiting them, the big food stores do offer multi purpose compost and some even have three for £10 offers currently. Every growing season has its unique challenges but 2020 will be exceptional, even if the weather is benign!
ReplyDeleteWe were trying to avoid going shopping as we usually order most of our groceries online. However, that might not be possible as there never appears to be any available delivery slots. We might just have to go and join one of the supermarket queues as see what we can get. It's going to be a challenging year even if we can keep this dread virus away.
DeleteI order groceries online, too, as a matter of course. The delivery service I use, Instacart, now offers a choice of "first delivery available" which works just fine, about four hours when I tried it. But the thing I'm watching now is the minimum default tip the strikers are asking for. To me 10% is too much for a dropoff. So hang in their and keep checking the website for your delivery service, things may change.
DeleteHi Jane
DeleteWe’re trying a just after midnight attempt to get a delivery slot. Currently all delivery slots up to the third week in April are fully booked. The weather is forecast to improve over the weekend so I might think about sowing some seeds.
Martyn, that's terrible, the worst I've heard about
Deletecommon sense Martyn a rare occurence these days
ReplyDeleteI agree David I don’t think there’s much about these days.
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