Garden Studios

Gardeners are obsessed by the elements. But it’s not surprising since most of our activities are governed by it. 

We watch the nightly forecast with more avidity than most and we open the bedroom curtains within the morning to look if the former night’s predictions were accurate – and i’ve to confess they’re better now than they’ve ever been.

But just checking what the elements goes to do is solely the half it. It’s a lot more fun to take a position for your own weather station and keep your personal records. Will this make you a closer gardener? Well, 

it might make you a more observant one, and it’ll remind you – after a winter of heavy rainfall like this – that the floor would be more with out nutrients than usual and should need bolstering with both fertiliser and manure to get it back in good heart.

The simplest variety of weather recording is a maximum and minimum thermometer that are hung outside in a still, sheltered spot to record the highs and lows all year long. It could be checked and reset daily and the temperatures may be either written down in a notebook in any other case entered on a spreadsheet in your computer. Correlating which plants were damaged by low temperatures (and just how low those temperatures were) offers you a demonstration of the hardiness of certain tender plants on your locale.

A simple rain gauge can be utilized to maintain daily tabs at the amount of precipitation (this type of lovely word for rain, snow and hail) and let you compare rainfall for a similar month in several years.  

More sophisticated ‘weather stations’ are actually available and needn’t cost an arm and a leg. They are often mounted indoors and may show you wind direction and speed (when connected to an anemometer in your house roof), maximum and minimum temperature, rainfall and barometric pressure. When the barometer falls rapidly you may prepare for unsettled conditions.

Many of those instruments now have wireless connections and so don’t involve a welter of cables wending their way from house roof to the rooms indoors.

And other than the usefulness the elements statistics can bring, they’ll fuel conversations corresponding to “Do you realize just how much rain we had last month?” or “Guess how hot it was yesterday”.

The latter can be a way off yet, but with a weather station at your elbow you’ll become, if not the oracle at Delphi, then certainly the font of all knowledge so far as local gardeners are concerned. This may also make an outstanding birthday present – tell that in your other half otherwise treat yourself. You recognize you’re worth it!

Don’t miss Alan’s gardening column today and each day within the Daily Express. For more info on his range of gardening products, visit alantitchmarsh.com.