We said goodbye to the summer of 2023, and particularly August with some relief – the gloomiest ever August here, with very few dry days in either July or August.

Fortunately, September roared into action with brighter weather, temperatures into the mid-twenties, and plenty of sunshine, which at last allowed us to cut the final sections of our upper hay meadow.

A week away on the coast had been booked which was much needed after all this effort, but we returned to weather changing again with often heavy rain and strong winds – autumn seemed to be arriving early, though temperatures were still unseasonably mild.

The wonderful white Lilium speciosum album in the copse came and went surprisingly quickly this year, looking a little sad after wind and rain battering.

But in between often grey skies, there were interludes with wonderful light, and the whole world still seemed wonderfully green!

The month finished in the same vein with a 25 mm rainfall day, under grey skies, and staying very mild. Everywhere the warmth and wet kept the landscape very green with little obvious autumnal colour – yet. Right at the end of the month, the 4 remaining viable bee colonies all began to bring in pollen, after many weeks where this wasn’t very obvious.

Of the 2 colonies that had definitely swarmed, one remained inactive, whilst the other seemed to suffer repeated episodes of robbing – or at least interest from off site bees, with fighting at the entrance.

The monthly rainfall total was a heavy 223.92 mm and the PV reading of just 294.92 KWH placed it as one of the wettest and gloomiest Septembers in our time here. At least there were 7 dry days, although most of these came in the first 10 days of the month, as illustrated below. The Met Office summary for the year, list it as the warmest September ever, for Wales, and the UK, in a record going back to 1884, with an average daily temperature of 15.6 degrees C, around 2.5 degrees higher than the 30 year average. This seems about right for our local experience. However we clearly had much higher rainfall and less light here, than the summaries implied from the whole-of-Wales maps. The Met Office comment that such extremes would only have a 3% chance of happening without human-induced climate change, which so far have raised average global temperatures by around 1.1 degrees C since the industrial revolution.