July began with a murky morning and cooler temperatures after the very hot weather at the end of June. Rain fell on the first 2 days, and then sunshine returned. When I wrote this sentence at the beginning of the month, I didn’t realise just how much the lack of any rain, high temperatures and sunshine would dominate this month in ways reminiscent of the drought of 1976.

With rising temperatures and little rainfall, it was perfect, in fact, for a celebratory family gathering here, and then swiftly moving into a second phase of haymaking, as temperatures headed to 30 degrees C under often sunny skies and light winds.

This weather theme continued – no further rain, more hot haymaking, more honey bee activity and bearding, and rotational, minimal watering of plants, to keep many shrubs alive.

The garden and landscape were heading into a quiet, shutting down, staying alive mode. The gardeners were becoming increasingly tired with rotational watering of most valued shrubs and perennials and aware that the 6,000 litres of stored water in several IBC containers would have to last…. for how long, until more rain fell? 

For the first time we covered the car in sheets to keep it cool, and hung anything over the outside of windows and doors to keep the sun’s rays from the house’s interior – it paid off, the house rarely became uncomfortably hot, and downstairs was kept below 20 degrees at all times – a cool refuge.

Bird behaviour changed – many juvenile thrushes and blackbirds shifted diets to snails and even slugs, as earthworms moved deeper underground and went into knotted, aestivation mode.

Up until the third week of July, the garden and landscape looked superficially attractive, but thereafter fields began to brown, and plants like bugle, London Pride and many of our other stalwart ground-protecting low cover plants began to desiccate and foliage died – will they recover when rain eventually returns? Who knows.

We were by now locked into serious heat prevention mode for the house, opening for ventilation and chilling only early in the morning and late at night, as temperatures dropped away a little. There was still moisture in the air – the novelty of dew-created rivulets forming on the slates reminding us that the atmosphere still held lots of moisture.

But the moisture was needed at root level. Partly due to the hare discovery, and partly due to having fewer ewes and lambs, we were able to leave all of our fields with higher grass cover to give some protection from dessication. I successfully trialled topping some areas of the hay meadow with our Makita Li-ion hedge trimmer, and raking off the seed heads and relocating into other fields for green hay. Not dissimilar to manual scything in terms of the progress one could make across a field, but tiring in the heat.

Meanwhile, watering continued at least 4 times a day in different parts of the garden – in part using stored water from our 7 IBCs (thank goodness we’d already acquired those after previous dry summers) and extracted using our small Bosch Li-ion pump and hose, in part hosed from our spring supply. And many, many watering cans lugged to the distant parts of the garden.

The inverter readout shows a unique picture of all-day sunshine for the weeks of much of mid-July. The worst combination of harsh insolation, high temperatures and zero rain. Nothing exceptional for many parts of the UK, or indeed the world, but a severe stress for our normally verdant temperate and high-humidity environment.

By the end of the month, Natural Resources Wales had declared that the whole of Wales was in a drought, after the driest July since detailed Met Office records began 190 years ago. Our own monthly data for July 2026 shows a record PV inverter reading – despite the system being 16 years old, of 623.06 KWH for the month, reflecting the high levels of sunshine and high temperatures. The previous high was a figure of 609 KWH from June 2020.

The rainfall total for the month was just 8.15 mm with 24 dry days. Thank goodness for the few murkier mizzly, damp days at the end of the month, which also allowed me to safely refill one nearly empty IBC, over a 24 hour period. My previous lowest figure for July was 58.71 mm, in 2025. The average July rainfall for the years since 2013, when I started to record such things, excluding this year, is 101.2 mm

Maximum and minimum readings for the month are highlighted below, which shows just how unusual a month it was for the weather in this ‘super’ El Niño year:

2013: 67.6 mm, 20 dry days, PV record -N/A

2014: 64.1 mm, 15 dry days, PV – 468.6 KWH

2015: 127.3 mm,  7 dry days, PV – 379.1 KWH

2016: 86.4 mm, 11 dry days, PV  –  390.6 KWH

2017: 138.3 mm, 10 dry days PV – 406.77 KWH

2018: 74.5 mm, 20 dry days, PV – 508.11 KWH

2019: 73.8 mm, 16 dry days, PV – 460.61 KWH

2020: 121.1 mm, 15 dry days, PV – 399.77 KWH

2021:  77.6 mm, 14 dry days, PV – 470.28 KWH

2022: 112.1 mm, 21 dry days, PV – 490.49 KWH

2023: 201.3 mm, 6 dry days, PV – 377.75 KWH

2024: 123.4 mm, 7 dry days, PV – 410.67 KWH

2025: 58.71mm, 10 dry days, PV  480.58 KWH

2026: 8.15mm, 24 dry days, PV – 623.06 KWH