A Gardener's Weather Diary

Tuesday, 18 April 2023

Experimenting with parsnip seeds

April’s weather hasn’t been all that good for gardening. Last week was on the wet side and the result is that the allotment needs a few days of dry weather before any more beds can be dug over.

Monday, 20 March 2023

Still waiting for spring

So far March has been a disappointing month weather wise. It started off cold before turning cold and snowy. The last week has been on the wet side.

Temperatures for the last week have been all over the place.

Sunday, 12 March 2023

A cold and snowy start to March

February brought an end to meteorological winter but March has started on a cold note.

It certainly has been a very cold start to March. Most news bulletins about the weather have started off stating that Wednesday was the coldest day of the year. However, in our case that isn’t true as that particular record is still held by 22 January 2023 when the temperature fell to -5.9°C or 21.4°F. The temperature on Wednesday fell to -3.4°C or 25.9°F. Since then in the early hours of Saturday morning, the temperature fell to -3.6°C or 25.5°F.

Monday, 6 March 2023

Meteorological spring arrives – really!

February brought an end to meteorological winter but March has started on a cold note. February itself was a record breaker. It was the mildest February of the last 14 years and also the driest in the same period.

Sunday, 26 February 2023

Chitting potatoes – I’ve had to risk it

I think some of our seed potatoes have been saved by this blog post. I decided to write this week’s post about how I’ve been contemplating moving our potatoes from the sack they’ve been stored in in the garage to the greenhouse.

Monday, 20 February 2023

Damage from storm Otto & more tidying up

It’s been a windy few days following the arrival and departure of storm Otto. The main storm itself didn’t last all that long but with a highest gust speed of 36mph it made it into my listing of windiest days of the last 14 years based on gust speed alone.

Monday, 13 February 2023

Experimental red onions

We’ve always had trouble growing red onions. We had always grown our onions from sets and red sets had never performed as well as the brown ones. They’d be grown alongside one another and given the same treatment so we could never decide exactly what we were doing wrong. When we harvested our usual poor crop of red onions in 2020 we decided we’d had enough of trying to grow reds and we’d stick to the brown varieties in 2021.

Monday, 6 February 2023

The new season begins

Since the middle of January, we’ve had very little rain so both the garden at home and the allotment have started to dry out enough to consider doing a little bit of early gardening.