September began with a run of days with at least some rain, which finally began to restore the groundwater levels after the record-breaking summer of 2025.

The shorter days and cloudier skies also saw the return of some lovely cloudscapes.

The garden finally picked up from its drought stressed appearance for the later part of summer, with an apple crop at least 3 times better than our previous best, and strangely the best ever Cyclamen hederifolium flowering. They are the most amazing flowers for growing in deep dry shade, right up to the base of even coniferous trees.

In the meadows, small toadlets were almost a daily sight as they have been for weeks, field mushrooms kept appearing in small numbers in all but one of our fields, and on the very day Fiona reminded I should start dribbling pee around the hay meadows from my watering can, to deter them, I found the first small patch that had been ripped up overnight.

We said farewell to surplus ewes (5) and ram lambs (6), and have planned for 2026 to be a year with far fewer, earlier lambs, (or maybe none at all!) which might allow us to assess just how well my efforts with establishing flowers in all our meadows, by scattering green hay, has been. These are the 2 ewes, Jetfire and Jumblie, which we’re allowing to spend most time with 2 of our (unrelated) ram lambs. 3 other ewe favourites, Itzim, Jonquil, and Jamage were added a couple of weeks later. 

A quite infrequent total lunar eclipse of a full moon was visible early in the month, though ‘totality’ was missed due to cloud and it happening around the (hidden) horizon as the moon rose at dusk. Still a very special thing to watch, as more of the moon came into view over the course of a couple of hours.

A little later in the month, we witnessed a large flock of, I guess 25 to 30 House Martins appear in the yard, all desperately trying to land under the eaves of the house, before settling on the slates. Within half an hour or so, they’d all moved off, and left the scene. A wonderful experience to behold, and one we’ve never witnessed before at Gelli. They’ve never nested successfully on our house, for some reason, and are only rarely sighted in the valley these days.

The month continued with some rain on most days, but still some wonderful sunny moments, and glorious cloudscapes, before a couple of  write off gloomy grey days, of the type that often occur, but have been far less frequent for most of the year so far.

We timed a week away in Pembrokeshire towards the end of the month, for glorious dry sunny days, after a 40 mm deluge on the first day.

On return another heavy rain day was followed by yet more sunny benign still weather.

Apart from the record apple crop, spider’s webs around the metal table have been wonderful, and autumn colour is noticeably later in developing than in many recent years, with several early plants only colouring up towards the end of the month.

By the end of the month when the final data was to hand, it seems it was the wettest September in my records, with 243.1 mm of rain falling. However, we still managed 10 dry days, and as all the photos included above, and the PV inverter record shows, sufficient sunny spells and lovely clouds for it to have seemed quite a reasonable month. This ties in with the Met Office summary of weather in Wales and the UK for September 2025. This assesses Wales having 74% more rainfall than for the 30 year average of recent Septembers. Highlighted  max/min records below:

2014: 13.7 mm, 24 dry days (!) NA

2015: 105.8 mm, 13 dry days, PV – 354.6 KWH

2016: 173.5 mm, 10 dry days, PV – 272.9 KWH

2017: 237.5 mm, 6 dry days, PV –  264.7 KWH

2018: 172.1 mm, 9 dry days, PV – 307 KWH

2019: 202.2 mm, 9 dry days, PV – 333 KWH

2020: 116.6 mm, 16 dry days, PV – 351.9 KWH

2021: 143.8 mm, 14 dry days, PV –  293 KWH

2022: 205.6 mm, 13 dry days, PV – 294 KWH

2023: 223.9 mm, 7 dry days, PV – 294.9 KWH

2024: 156 mm, 7 dry days, PV – 254 KWH

2025: 243.1 mm, 10 dry days, 307.6 KWH