August 2023 continued in the same vein as July, which the Met Office flagged as the eleventh wettest for Wales since records began 188 years ago, with generally grey, wet, and often breezy weather.

Temperatures were also often on the cool side. By the middle of the month, we’d gone for over 2 months, since the fabulously dry and sunny May and early June, with no more than 2 dry days in a row, and very few dry days at all.

This has had big implications for the garden and meadows – it’s been almost impossible to cut any more hay. Though we managed a couple of sections from both lower and upper meadows around the 7th to 10th, despite the hay getting rained on significantly.

The longer-term forecasts suggest that this weather pattern caused by a locked-in jet stream being lower over the UK than is normal during the summer is set to continue well into September, with no hint of any sort of Indian summer.

Hydrangeas have really enjoyed this, and so too have the meadows – largely uncut they’ve been a delight to wander through, and we’ve never had so many meadow butterflies and grasshoppers around for so long. The first waxcaps are emerging too, in both upper and lower meadows.

The biggest downside to these conditions is the huge germination of weeds in the yard, paths, and vegetable garden. And no sunshine to manage weed control with my usual hot water and salt treatment. In addition, summer squash have failed completely, courgettes have been poor, and the autumn raspberries are late.

So far few blackberries have ripened and nearly all the native flower forage stalwarts for honey bees have flowered very early, so we’re unsure what will be available for them in the months ahead.

It’s highlighted just how beneficial an early meadow cut can be, as above, in allowing a second flush of nectar and pollen-rich flowers for many insects – as well as being a visual delight for us.

 

The terrace garden has looked as good as it ever has at this time of the year, during those fairly brief periods when the clouds have parted.

As has the developing planting on the rear bank.

The tyre garden has also recovered well from the early season drought.

And the croquet lawn is also past its early summer nadir.

But there haven’t been so many lovely cloudscapes to photograph, at least by the middle of the month.

A sudden forecast of 3 days meant what may turn out to be the last hay cut for 2023. True to form, as soon as it had been cut, the mirage day of sunshine and high temperatures morphed into a day of thick clouds, and we had to work very hard to get it all under cover before the rain returned.

All the work propagating Devil’s-bit scabious plants in the last few years has paid off with many lovely forms appearing later in the month.

Sadly the weather continued in the same vein for the whole of the rest of the month. One consequence was we had the worst year ever for cases of fly strike, with several ewes affected and with us even losing one, after she walked into a ditch and got stuck beneath brambles, and our best efforts couldn’t save her.

By the end of the month we still had quite a large section of the upper hay meadow uncut.

On a more upbeat note, I still managed to photograph both male and female Common Blue butterflies in the upper hay meadow, as well as finding an example of a new hoverfly in the lower.

For lots of reasons, the summer of 2023 won’t rank as one of our favourites!

On a brighter note, all the grey damp weather meant it was perfect for me to set to, and start to sow lots of different meadow seeds in small root trainers, with the aim of planting them out next year into the 4 remaining fields which for now are quite species poor.

The month finished with another grey damp day. And the data tells the story that it’s been the gloomiest and wettest August we’ve ever experienced with just 5 dry days, a total of 187.91 mm of rain, (not as bad as the very wet 2020 record) although the PV inverter reading of just 327 KWH – “beat” the previous record of 334 KWH from that year. The Met Office summary for the summer of 2023 shows that it was the 8th warmest on record, but also a wetter than average one. For our small corner of South West Wales, it was the lack of sunshine particularly in August, which was most striking – apparently only 50-70% of the 30 year average, even though this included the almost as dingy August 2020.

An example showing just how dull it was, on occasion, is this daily read out from later in the month.