April began on Easter Monday with the weather pattern of February and March still holding sway, and the first 7 days of the month saw 125 mm of rainfall and a named storm, ‘Kathleen’, impacted slightly over the weekend of the 6th/7th with more heavy rain and strong winds.

A tough year for our young lambs and the garden. A couple of ewes lambed during this stormy period, and were some of the more challenging assisted births I’ve had to cope with over the years.

Yet the daffodils continue to shine in such conditions and delight us both.

Negotiating the fields and doing anything productive in the garden is very challenging at the moment with the ground completely saturated. We’re fortunate that few people, understandably, fancy visiting a garden in this weather since some of our woodland paths would struggle to stand up to heavy footfall.

It’s not been a wonderful year for tulips, so far, compounded by the fact that our supplier seems to have sent us a duff batch of substitutes for our favoured ‘Flaming Purissima’ which we plant every year in the magic terrace garden. This year’s bulbs are superficially similar, but don’t have the wonderful rich variation of flower colour and form as the originals, and are lacking the yellow stain at the flower base, and black anthers.

By April 11th we were still waiting for a dry 24-hour period in the month and had very little sunshine to speak of. Fiona and I have never felt so tired as this week when after a long day lifting and sorting aberrant daffodil bulbs in the Malus copse, followed by lugging the 50 or so bags of daffodils we’ve lifted last season into place, for planting a little later on, my day which had begun at 4.30a.m. with a ewe check, ended cutting some of the half dry grass after supper, and then another lambing as dusk pending. This turned out to be the most protracted and physical delivery I’ve ever completed. I and the ewe, ‘Hartlebury’ were exhausted by the end, and the poor ram lamb arrived in the world, with almost a death rattle and very odd, terminal-looking postural changes after we finally got him out. Miraculously, he rallied round, but by midnight was still unable to stand or feed, so we milked out H, and fed this to the lamb, finally getting into bed by 12.30pm.

As we walked back to the house, we noticed that the skies had cleared a little, and stars were visible for the first time in ages. We decided a constellation or star name beginning with ‘K’ would be appropriate for the lamb, and eventually ‘Kang’ was arrived at. The following morning, much to my surprise he was still alive. He wasn’t out of the woods and several more sessions of milking out and syringe feeding followed over the next 36 hours.

Our lambing finished with 16 from 10 ewes, 1 ewe not pregnant and 7 ewe lambs, so probably the best result to date, if one of the most demanding, in part ‘cos we’re not getting any younger, but also because the weather during the month continued to be very poor.

We did at last get a few dry days and eventually a couple of nice sunrises and this change at last allowed us to complete some of our vital tasks which have been put off for so long, with the constant wet.

I managed to add a super to the 2 hives which I aim to take a box of comb honey off, towards the end of the month, on a rare day when the sun shone and temperature reached just 10 degrees C!

Parts of the garden have looked lovely when the sun has shone, but overall it’s an April to forget, coming in an extending season of grey and wet months which now stretches back to July 2023!

The last 2 days of the month were particularly wet, and windy. We wish we could see signs of change in the long-term forecast, but sadly we can’t!

Here’s the sequence for Aprils since 2014 when I’ve been recording rainfall and light levels using our PV inverter data:

136.9mm – N/A

34mm – 519 KWH

108mm – 394 KWH

47mm – 410 KWH

158mm – 346 KWH

94mm – 416KWH

50mm – 498 KWH

19mm – 522 KWH

53mm – 420 KWH

111mm – 393 KWH.

2024:  225 mm – 299.7 KWH – a record high, a record low!

As well as the 225.1 mm of rain in the month (42 % more than the previous high), we at least enjoyed 8 dry 24-hour periods, and only 2 very light air frosts to minus 2 degrees C – far fewer than in most previous years. The inverter reading shows just two 20kwh plus days – an indication of just how rare full sunshine was throughout the month. The Met Office summary for April 2024 somewhat downplays just how poor a month it’s been in our part of the world.