A Gardener's Weather Diary: Meteorological autumn is here

Saturday 4 September 2021

Meteorological autumn is here - what happened to summer?

Meteorological autumn has arrived but quite frankly it seems to have been here for a few weeks now.

August was, without doubt, the poorest of the summer months finishing in eighth place out of the last 12 years. It also finished up as the driest over the same period.

August Temperature & Rainfall 2010-2021

I was surprised, last week when the UK Met Office said that we’d had a good summer well up the table of warmest summers. I’d have said that we’d had a pretty poor summer so I was surprised to find that, based on average temperatures from my weather station, this summer ranks third out of the last 12 summers. Perhaps average temperature isn’t always the best way of telling whether we’ve had a good summer or not.

August would have had a lower average temperature if it hadn’t been for a run of above average nighttime temperatures. Generally, daytime temperatures were around average or below and we didn’t have any “hot “ days at all, with the month’s highest temperature only managing 24.3°C degrees.

Allotment wise, with fruit and vegetables, as usual it has been a bit of a hit and miss season. Most of our tree fruit suffered badly from the cold weather in April and May with late season frosts damaging the apple, pear and plum crops. However, we've had one of our best potato crops for a good number of years.

Casablanca Potatoes - 02 July 2021

Our early pot-grown potatoes were a disaster this year but all the ones grown on the allotment produced excellent crops. This year for some reason our potatoes avoided any wireworm damage and had very minimal damage from slugs. After a poor year last year, with one bed of onions failing completely, this year's crop has been excellent with lots of good-sized onions.

Onions - Hercules, Centurian & Sturon

We also had an excellent crop of garlic for the first time in many years. Our first sowing of peas failed completely, once again probably due to the cold weather in April and May but later sowings have been much more successful.

Now we are into autumn we would normally be thinking about harvesting our apples and pears but we've very few of either to harvest this year.

It's certainly time to start getting beds cleared of their summer crops so that they can be dug over before any really bad weather sets in. The more clearing and preparing we can do through autumn and early winter the better prepared we will be for the start of the next growing season.