July 2020 will be remembered as beginning at least, as a challenging month, with generally poor light with limited sunshine, as well as with yet another honeybee swarm arriving and setting up base in one of my vacant baited hives set up around the property this spring.

This image of the PV inverter output for the first 10 days of the month illustrate these gloomy conditions well – given the very long day length at this time of the year, the total of 80 KWH generated is really low.

July always seems to be a month when garden maintenance switches from predominantly hand weeding to predominantly cutting back excess aging foliage and deadheading early flowering perennials to tidy things for the next wave of flowers to shine, though we’ve left more of the Aquilegia for longer to allow the bullfinches to harvest their seeds.At last around July 10th the weather forecasts showed a 3 day dry weather window, ( just a day after 41 mm of rain had fallen over 48 hours) so after much discussion, we cut a large section of hay in the lower wet meadow, only to find that as I finished cutting, and checked again, the forecasts had changed already, and we only had 48 hours to get it dry in cool conditions with limited sunshine and a Northerly wind, before more rain was due. Multiple turnings and working until 8 pm on Sunday evening meant we finished in the nick of time with just Saturday’s poor light levels, and a single day of sunshine on Sunday, as above. The initially forecast third dry day ended up with 6 mm of rain falling, which would have written off the hay completely. Fortunately we’re still fit enough to work fast under such pressure…

When we’ll manage to cut any more hay remains to be seen as I write this. It certainly seems that mean reversion of our weather to compensate for the amazingly sunny and dry spring weather is kicking in.

There have still been some fleeting episodes of lovely light to appreciate the scenes around the garden and wider landscape.

The upper hay meadow has benefited from not being able to be cut as early, with the best floral display it’s ever produced, just 7 years after we started its restoration from being a flower free zone…

Which has convinced me to manage this field in a similar way in years to come. The fairly narrow swathes I cut are a little more tricky to manage with the hay turning, but do allow the field to look lovely, and almost uncut, from above and below, whilst allowing all the invertebrates plenty of refuges to escape into and complete life cycles gradually without all foliage being removed in one fell swoop.

Honey bees have inevitably been seen more often around the garden in spite of the poor weather, with a fourth swarm taking up residence around lunchtime on July 2nd.

And a fifth swarm arrived in the lower wet meadow hive around July 13th, though on this occasion I missed the actual swarming event. Another brief 4 day weather window with no rain, although very cool temperatures with night time drops to barely 3 degrees C, allowed us to cut the final section of our lower wet meadow for hay on July 18th, and get it under cover in time…

Finishing the day before our younger son and family were due to arrive for 3 days of socially distanced camping…Putting all the tents up and general food preparation on the back of another heavy hay session reminded us that firstly we’re getting a bit creakier, and secondly after struggling with working out how the tents were all put together (after a gap of 12 years or so), we were reminded why we quickly shifted to rental cottage based holidays ourselves, before we acquired Gelli Uchaf, all those years ago.

Their visit coincided with a sighting of both a Hummingbird Hawk-moth, and a Purple Hairstreak butterfly, and after the family had left both Fiona and I spotted a kingfisher on consecutive days on the stream, a real delight after seeing one last year, a little later in the August.

A single Common Blue, second generation, emerged in the last week of the month, and was seen visiting the Eyebright flowers – the first time I’ve seen any insect pollinating these very pretty flowers, which in 2020 are becoming quite widespread, after many years of me hand collecting and scattering their fine seed around.

First Waxcap mushrooms of the season have appeared throughout the month…

Another brief weather window, which saw the grey clouds finally departing Eastwards…… saw us cut another 2 horizontal swathes in the upper hay meadow after taking all the tents down and we had a single perfect hay making day on the 30 th – strong Southerly wind, sunshine most of the day and temperatures in the mid twenties.

How rare this has been in the summer of 2020. However the run of mixed weather has meant that we’ve enjoyed seeing the upper meadow’s flowers develop exponentially this year, and our strategy of sequential staggered horizontal swathes has allowed some visually stunning scenes, and also enabled the insect life in particular to thrive in this rare oasis of flowers amongst the flower free green fields that cover most of the surrounding hills.

The month ended with one of the hottest days of the year, after dawn broke with clear blue skies, swallows milling around the yard, the latest, seven, chicks having fledged…

…. before the weather morphed to thick mists and mizzle early in the afternoon just after we’d got all the hay safely inside…

… and then clearing to spectacular clouds at dusk.

With yet another swarm of ants in the meantime…

An amazing day to finish a fairly typical July here…Just 399 KWH recorded on the PV for the month, so not far from our greyest ever July, and 121.0 mm of rainfall.