Below Par July

For us July certainly wasn't anything special. It consisted of one hot day early on in the month with the remainder of the month around average or even a bit below.

Average July Temperatures For Ossett (UK)

As you can see from the table above July's average monthly temperature was a little below average based on the last few years and it ranked fifth warmest out of eight.

We also had below average rainfall in July. The first half of the month was dry with no rainfall to speak of but the second half was much wetter with some amount of rainfall almost every day.

August has begun much like July ended with lots of very light showers, breezy, and temperatures around average for the beginning of August.

August is traditionally my month for lifting most of our potatoes. Usually by the middle of the month most of the potato haulms will be turning yellow. I'll start lifting the potatoes as leaving them in the ground any longer will increase their chances of them being damaged by pests.

Two rows of Kestrel potatoes, in the bed above, had already died back and were lifted during the last week of July. The dry weather had substantially reduced their yield which was only half the amount of last year. Last year was the first time we'd grown Kestrel and they produced an excellent crop weighing in at 19.4kg (43lb) of completely pest free potatoes which we thought tasted good too. We thought they earned their place on this year's list of choice varieties and although they have only produced half the weight of last year's crop, with 9.2kg or 20lb, we're putting this down to the exceptionally dry spell of weather. Once again the potatoes are completely pest free. I think we'll be trying them again next year.

Potato - "Kestrel"

It will be interesting to see how our other potatoes have coped with the very dry conditions from planting time at the beginning of April through to late June.

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