by Derek Smith
It’s 10 degrees when I first come in the garden at 10 am, but feeling colder with a stiff breeze. There’s a cold blue sky, almost clear of clouds. Cloudless skies at night give us chilly mornings, as there is no insulating cloud layer. The longer nights add to the chill. The day has less time to climb out of …
It is chilly today, around 14 degrees and windy making it feel colder as the wind takes away heat. This is the end of Indian summer, leaving us with weather more akin to the average in October. We are in mid autumn, Keats’s season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is over. There are seeds but no longer fruit, mist yes, …
It’s mild, about 21 degrees, overcast, a dirty white carapace, teasing us with the suggestion of rain we so badly need, but don’t get. There is still a hosepipe ban, this late in the year. The warm weather is both welcome and somewhat scary, as we envisage what climate change has in store in future years. We are at about …
The autumn equinox fell on Wednesday, 23 September this year. The equinox varies, year to year, from 22 to 23 September usually. Though, very occasionally it can be on 21 and 24. The next time it will fall on 21 September is 2092. It will not occur on 24 September until 2303! The variance is because our year, the time …
We had 5 mm of rain in the early morning, bringing September’s total so far to 39 mm, well above average, although 26mm of that was delivered on Tuesday. It is catch up time, and do we need it. The drought may be over but there is a big deficit, illustrated by our pond. I have been monitoring our rain …
We have had two eclipses recently, the solar, and on Friday the lunar eclipse. Both partial, but up in the 90 per cents. The solar eclipse we watched from the garden. That was at a respectable hour, around 7 pm, but the lunar eclipse was at 4 am, with unlikely many takers at that hour. My daughter and I got …
We had a couple of millimetres of rain last week, but that soon evaporated in the heat. The last decent downpour was on 27 June. There is a hosepipe ban, but one cannot complain, reservoirs are low, rivers low. Farmers are suffering, their crops have awful yields, some they have given up on. It’s no good looking to Europe, the …
On the evening of the eclipse, about twenty of us came into the garden to watch its progress. There were a similar number of garden volunteers on Wanstead Flats. In the garden, we had seats, tables and shelter. On the Flats they could watch it to the very end. In either place, the eclipse was a celebration, bringing people together …
We have had no rain since 27 June. That’s 35 dry days. We are in a drought, as evidenced by our flagging plants. Lack of rain has been made worse by the hot weather where much of our watering evaporates before plants can use it. There’s a hosepipe ban, but at least we have our tap, and how necessary it …
At the beginning of July, I harvested the flax, I had grown in the small raised bed, when all the flowers had gone and the stalks were turning yellow. This may have been too early as the seeds weren’t ripe. I left the flax in a stook to dry, in the hope there was sufficient moisture in the stalks for …
