I didn't watch the Royal Wedding. It's not really my sort of thing, but I'm glad today turned out fine, given all the people who did want to line the route, or hold their own street parties. The lack of rain is getting serious, though. A while back the Systems Administrator, who likes technology, added to the data empire by investing in an electronic weather station. This takes all sorts of weather related measurements and transmits them by wireless back to a base station in the house, which displays and stores them. They can be downloaded to the p.c. and in theory we could analyse them and produce graphs and tables galore.
The rain gauge requires at least 0.7mm precipitation in one go to read it. In total since 1st March it has recorded 9mm, which is a seriously small amount of rain. 9mm is less than half an inch. Even allowing for one or two showers of less than 0.7mm that's a pathetic amount of rain to fall in nearly two months. Coastal north Essex is one of the dryest places in the country, but we expect to get around 21 inches or 525mm per annum on average. Since the start of March we're running at an annualised rainfall of around 50mm or 2 inches.
An increasing proportion of each gardening day is spent watering. Watering recent plantings, watering the fruit (we had a dry April last year, I didn't water the sweet cherry enough, and after a good set it dropped its entire crop), watering trees planted within the past year, and things badly hit by last winter's cold but which I think might have the capacity to resprout if the drought doesn't finish them off, and the little patch of new turf where I cleared away the bags of left-over sand. I felt a certain wry amusement one of the last times I visited Hyde Hall, where after going past the much trumpeted Dry Garden (never irrigated after initial planting) I saw the sprayers going on the borders even though there wasn't then a drought. Nothing here is routinely irrigated, apart from edible crops and recent plantings, and the plants in most of the garden, not just the gravel garden, are chosen for their modest moisture requirements. No border phlox or delphiniums or monarda here, and few viburnums. If this weather goes on much longer, however, then even established plants will start showing signs of acute stress, and will require a drenching with the hose.
If I were having a house built from scratch, I would instal a grey water capture system and a very large underground water storage tank during the initial construction. It is so much easier to fit these things at the outset than to retrofit. We are eyeing up the price of water tanks once again, as there would be room for quite an array of them under the veranda, but they are expensive. The last time we did the maths we would have to fill them from captured water a lot of times for it to be cheaper than buying the water out of the tap. We debate getting the well going again too, but again pumps are costly and tend to break down, and it's not clear we would manage to pump enough water to make the investment worthwhile.
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