The heatwave has finished - has summer?

The hot weather has ended after 7 days with no sign of a return according to the weather models. A couple of days made it into my table of top twenty hottest days of the last 12 years in eighth and tenth place.

Top twenty hottest days 2010 - 2021

It's clear from that table that our hottest weather generally occurs through July with 10 of our hottest days falling in July. Six of the hottest days have been recorded in August and four in June.

At the allotment, our problem isn't the hot weather but rather a lack of rainfall. It's 12 days now since we had any rain and the hot spell has dried out the early July rainfall.

These Charlotte potatoes looked like they'd run out of water so I decided to lift a couple of roots to see. Sure enough, the ground was very dry and as I'd expected the potatoes were small and had stopped growing prematurely. I decided I might as well lift the whole lot. The bed needs a good dig over but that's going to have to wait until we get a decent rainfall.

In the cold frame at home we have some Safari dwarf French beans waiting to be transplanted into the allotment.

I'm reluctant to plant these out until we get some rain. We recently planted out some autumn cropping broad beans and winter brassicas and through this dry spell they are needing plenty of water to keep them going.

Broad Beans - Luz de Otono

A mixture of Brassicas - Cauliflower & Cabbages

It's a busy time harvesting so I'm trying to keep watering time down to a minimum in order to spend as much time as possible harvesting. If you've picked blackcurrants you will know what a time consuming job it can be.

There is some showery rain forecast for this week but the day and time of these showers changes all the time and of course, given the very nature of showery weather we could miss out on them altogether.

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