The Unpredictable UK Summer

The unpredictable UK summer, shines on…

As growers and farmers go, we all get a bit of a fixation with the weather, it’s just never quite right. It may well be perfect in one field but anything but so in another field just yards way. We grow a huge range of different crops almost a hundred different vegetable varieties from a few short rows of basil in tunnels to almost 7 km of potatoes and 50,000 different cabbage types. Each crop has its own particular requirements of soil type and climate, the Basil loves the heat and is growing like crazy, as are the tomatoes and cucumbers, soaking up endless hours of sun radiation makes for big plants and a very high potential yield. Note, potential yield, no yield is a guarantee as things can go rapidly wrong with growing.

We try to create the ideal conditions for this range of cropping and have got our soil into a high level of fertility and it is able to impart its health onto our crops keeping them largely free of pests and diseases. This is the resilience we need in our soils as this also helps to reduce the negative effects of extreme weather events. The present round of heatwaves puts some of our crops under enormous stress, yes plants get stressed just like we do!  The brassicas family is the most widely grown vegetable crops in the World and features heavily in most people’s diets. Its ideal climate is a maritime one, so close to the sea where the air is damp and the temperatures not too high. It does not like hot and dry for too long, a few days are fine but the present levels of heat and drought are very difficult for it. We do what we can by applying regular amounts of irrigation to keep them cool and ward of the attentions of the flea beetle that comes in swarms form the Continent when we get these heatwaves. 

On the contrary, our 2500 squashes are revelling in the heat and long days, growing half a foot every day and pushing out flowers to be pollinated by the hordes of insects that we encourage to live alongside our crops. It has all the makings of a heavy and bountiful crop. But even these hot climate lovers need some wate if they are to crop well, lack of water or sunlight will induce all male flowering as a stress response to the prevailing conditions. What we need is lots of female flowers as it is them that make the fruits, with a few male flowers for pollination aided by our hard working insects. Last summer, if you recall we had a very gloomy overcast summer with above average rainfall and our squash went in to survival mode and for a few weeks produced nothing but male flowers. Eventually they wised up and fruited fairly well given how unsuitable the weather was, a late crop with reduced yield but still a decent crop. 

In a normal summer (almost impossible to define!) we would expect between March and September around 350mm of rainfall, roughly 50mm a month. This year so far since mid March we have had a mere 73mm that is less than 15mm monthly, so less than a third of the “normal” rainfall. So very dry, the media is banging on about the driest forever and indeed it is, but droughts are a regular feature of our local climate there have been many over my time here, I can recall at least 10 extended periods of little or no rain in the past 40 years that I’ve been here. Not every extreme weather event is down to climate change as the media will have you believe. Some of these events are just the weather doing what it has always done. We are in a very dry part of the country with the warmest weather and a poor stony soil so inevitably we will face droughts. There has never been a season when we have not irrigated some of our crops, we are used to doing this and accept the hassle and the cost of doing so. My organic farming career began in 1976, this was the driest ever summer with no rainfall hardly at all for 6 months. Water was rationed in many parts of the country and there was widespread failure of many food crops as a result, vegetables became very expensive, cauliflowers got to £1.25 today that would be around £12.50 each! The government even appointed a Minister of Drought to try and deal with the crisis. 

We have built resilience into our farm over many decades and we can for the most part cope with the weather without too many difficulties, it is a challenge that we are used to. Whatever climate change brings it will definitely bring more unpredictability to what is always been an unpredictable climate.