July 2024

The good news is that we have just got hold of a rain meter, so once we have worked out how it works and how we can connect it to the Pi, and written the code to support and start recording from it, we can see what the rainfall is each day and month. A good job we haven’t had it running for July as it would had been working very hard. We have had a lot of wet days and cold days which has made things feel colder than they were and more like October than the middle of summer. It saved itself at the end of the month with the crazy temperatures we expect, allowing the news channels to talk about heatwaves and giving us all tips on how to survive such events.

But July has been neither hot or cold, no records set in our garden for 2024. This still goes to 2022, the year where fires ignited themselves and burnt down houses, none of that this year.

Lowest 12.4c, highest 30.6c, average 18.6c

Not the best garlic harvest this year but at least all the bulbs split into segments unlike last year. I’m not sure why that was, I’ve seen others having less than good harvests so maybe I can blame the weather. A different story to carrots which after years of not really doing great with carrots we have had millions of large, orange, straight ones from the garden and various funny shape white and purple ones from the plot. They are starting to get slug damage now but it is still nice to pull up a carrot from the garden for tea. We are almost orange ourselves now for the amount of carrots we have been eating.

While we saw the end of the broad beans and the peas at the beginning of the month, we started picking runner and french beans by the end of the month. The wet weather has helped a lot, although also encouraged slugs to eat all of the lettuce. Another winner is courgettes, picking every other day.

We have dug the first row of potatoes as needed, I was hoping for around 5kg per row but instead for just over 3kg. Next month will be the “night of the potatoes” where we dig them all up and store them away for future use. It used to always be in July but it is now starting to be more like August.

A lot of the spring onions have now turned into small onions and while I have pulled up all the onions on the plot I have not yet bought them in as they are outside drying for a while. I’ll do that in the next week, sometime in August.

	2024 B/F £95.78
			IN	OUT
	runner beans – 364g		£2.86
	french beans – 167g		£1.13
	onions – 18g		£0.02
	garlic – 12		£7.20
	raspberries – 150g		£2.60
	potatoes – 3.123kg		£3.28
	courgettes – 1.953		£5.86
	spring onions – 162g		£1.56
	lettuce – 9g		£0.04
	carrots – 1.969kg		£1.38
	broad beans – 500g		£2.25
	peas – 210g		£0.77
	blackcurrants – 1.055kg		£14.07
	WEEK TOTAL		£43.02
	RUNNING 2024 TOTAL		£138.80