With considerable relief after the last 3 wet months, December began with only the second frost of the autumn/winter, and some welcome cold sunshine and misty scenes in the valley.

The very mild November meant a surprising number of flowers in the garden in the first week of the month, as well as many leaves on a couple of grown from seed Acers.

A high pressure system built over the next 10 days, with frosts to minus 10 degrees C, almost no wind and some wonderful cloudscapes, mists and golden light, particularly at dawn.

As I waited for one sunrise, wrapped up to stave off the extreme cold, I was greeted by the sight of a hardy paramotor wing appearing in the mid-distance and continuing with its quite noisy flight, due South West, down the Tywi valley.

The dry weather and lack of wind allowed an opportunity to take out several diseased young ash trees, which were dangerously close to our greenhouse.

We were also able to locate our 4 x 1,000 litre IBC containers around the garden, shield them with pallets and Miscanthus stems and fill them with our plentiful water supplies at this time of year.

 

Light snow showers arrived to add to the wintry scenes on 10th, as the annual task of hedge laying also began.

Then yet more bitterly cold but often bright weather continued into the middle of the month, finally ending with a switch from frozen ground, and minus 8 to minus 10, to plus 12 degrees C, strong winds and 40 mm of rain in a day, on December 18th.

 

This wet weather continued to the end of the month, with a largely grey, wet Christmas, and New year, although Boxing Day gave us some respite. There was a memorable moment on December 20th, when I waited and watched 5 woodcock fly in over the yew hedge, and curve North to eventually land in the upper hay meadow.

By Christmas Day, we had only 6  with any flowers “up”, and this had increased to just 21 snowdrop varieties by New Year’s Day. This is the lowest number in recent years, and almost certainly a reflection of the warm autumnal weather.

 

After a typically lengthy design process between Fiona and I, we were delighted to receive, (from the wonderful Mark Mennell at Etch and Cut) and be able to position 2 new projects based on a couple of my poems into the garden in a dry interlude on Boxing Day. “Ripples” and “Immaterial Rhapsody”. More can be found here. Met Office data shows 2022 has been the warmest year on record, averaged out across the UK. Here, December finished with 240.7mm of rain, and an annual figure of 1800.26mm, so certainly not our driest year since I’ve recorded such data. Although at the end of August it looked likely to be!

However, the last 4 months were consistently very wet. Overall, the year saw many more dry 24 hour periods (151 days with no recorded rain) than usual for us, although only 33 of these were in the last 4 months. Indeed it could almost be classified as a year of 2 halves, with March to August being much better than usual, but the other months bringing the year’s averages back to “normality”.

The PV inverter records for the month (41.94 KWH) and year (3,491 KWH) show how although overall light levels were very good for a system that is now over 12 years old, the first 2, and last 4, months were poor – reflecting the higher rainfall in these periods as well as the inevitable tail off with the reduced daylight hours, and lower position of the sun.