The “dry” spell didn't last into Tuesday as we had some early morning rain and a couple of light showers as it got dark. Only amounting to 0.8mm it didn't add much to our monthly total.
I don’t really consider our gardening season to have started yet but by default it has. We've got onions and shallots planted into modules to give them an early start and our newly arrived potatoes are chitting away merrily in the home greenhouse despite it still missing a couple of very large panes of glass. Sue sowed her cyclamen Latinia - she got the name wrong on the label - and they've become the first seeds of the season to go under the indoor growlight. It might be some time before they germinate if indeed they do at all. Fingers crossed.
Last week Sue and I were discussing what must be the trigger to let spring bulbs know it’s the time of year for them to begin pushing their leaves and flowers through the ground and provide us with those first welcoming signs of spring. We couldn't really come up with any real ideas although we did notice that despite us thinking that our snowdrops were early this year they were more or less the same time as previous years.
I was starting to put together some of the weather charts for this winter which meteorologically speaking ends on Friday. Below is the chart for solar energy or sunshine record for the three winter months.
As the daylight increases gradually it very easy to underestimate the changes taking place. Looking at the chart its just about possible to tell that the amount of energy increase a little bit in January compared to December but once we hit February the changes are much greater. Perhaps nature is just much better at detecting these little changes than we are.
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That's interesting Mike, there's a huge difference for February. It must be a real trigger for some plants.
ReplyDeleteSpring is definately on its way.
DeleteThank you for your interesting bits of information, I to have sowed some of my seeds of chillies and tomatoes, I'm hopping for a good crop, for my piripiri sauce...
ReplyDeletei wont be sowing my tomato seeds until the end of March.
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