2023 - What a year for weather!

To me, the outstanding memory of this year - assuming I want to remember it, that is - is how weird the weather has been.  And how wet, miserable and grey the latter half of the year was.

 

And, no,  it's not just one of those "oh, the days were sunnier when we were young, the summers were long and hot, the winters were bright and crisp" feelings: I looked it up, and October 2023 is the wettest month since 1838.  

Alongside that, September 2023 was the warmest September on record. 

March of 2023 was the wettest in 40 years across England, after the driest February in 30 years. 

All of which is very unsettling for our plants (I have no idea how the farmers are coping....) and pretty unsettling for those of us who are self-employed and who work outdoors, as bad weather has a big impact on how many hours we can work, and therefore on our earnings.

Back in 2014, my garage flooded (it's in a block, away from the house, luckily) for the first time, due to a combination of insufficient drainage and a lot of rain. It was only about an inch deep, but it was very messy, and took a long time to dry out.

It happened again in 2016, left: then again in 2018, and I realised that it was going to become a regular event, so I took action and dug a drainage channel, to get the water away from the building. 

This helped, but the garage was flooded again in 2019, and again in 2020.

This year, 2023, the garage had flooded four times by June, and I'd stopped making a note of it after that, because now it floods - despite my drainage channel - every time we have heavy rain.

And yet, back in 2018, it was so hot and dry that I was writing article after article about how to cope with drought, how to water pots, how to resuscitate plants which had dried right out... seems incredible now, doesn't it? 

All of which seems to show that yes, climate change is a very real thing, although not quite in the way we'd imagined it would be. 

The official position is that climate change is linked to global warming, and we all assumed it was going to be hot and dry: but that turns out not to be the case. The climate might be getting warmer, but the weather is getting worse - and that's the difference between them. Climate "is", if you like: but weather "might be".  The climate is getting warmer, there's no doubt about that, on a world-wide scale:  but the actual weather, the stuff we deal with every day, is not getting warmer, as such: it's getting wetter, wilder, less predictable, less regular, less seasonal.

In fact, in 2020 I wrote an ironic article about climate change, where I went through an article from a gardening magazine, from ten years earlier, and commented on how wrong the predictions within it had been: they thought we'd all have astro-turf (because it would be too hot and dry for grass) and prairie planting with drought-tolerant plants.... well, that turned out to be a bit off the mark, didn't it! 

Although the astro-turf thing is sort of coming true: I'm seeing a lot of artificial grass these days, especially in tiny new-build gardens. I can't really blame them: the sort of people who buy new builds are mostly young families, or working professionals, who don't know much about gardening and who don't have time for them anyway. 

The gardens are so small that there isn't room for a shed for the mower, and besides, the lawns are so small that it's barely worth getting a mower out anyway. And the houses are so small that an "outdoor room" has become a necessity rather than a luxury, and there's no point having an outside space that you can't use because it's muddy, or gets your shoes wet: so out goes the grass, and in comes the hard landscaping and the dreaded plastic grass.

Mmm, lovely.

"Not."

Sterile. But practical, if this is all the outside space you have, you poor things.

Oh, to be fair, I should also mention that most new builds don't have "soil" in the designated "garden" areas, they have subsoil and building rubble, compacted to a rock-like consistency, with no drainage and not much chance of anything growing in it, without expensive and messy remedial work beforehand. 

So it is a lot easier to just scrape off the top layer of weeds, and throw down the plastic grass.

So what can we hope for, in 2024?

More of the same, I suspect!  Unpredictable weather, plants flowering at the wrong time, late frosts, early heatwaves, miserable summers and milder winters, which sounds like a good thing, but to be honest, wouldn't you rather have a couple of weeks of cold-but-bright weather, rather than this relentless mild-but-dirty-grey stuff?

After all, most plants are not that worried by the snow, and it is awfully pretty to look at!

So there you have it, 2023 is nearly over, the day are starting to get longer again - yay! - and we are heading uphill to spring.

You may also have noticed a change on my blog: from now on, I'll be creating the new articles over on my Patreon page, on a weekly basis, with just one post a month on here, to keep you in touch.

But you are most welcome to trawl through the past posts on this blog, of course - and there are plenty to keep you occupied!

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