Week 26 - Overview

Some of the plants are doing well, and others are struggling. After the drought of March and April, the garden is now saturated! There was no rain today, but in the past 7 days, we have had over 52mm of rain - as much as we would normally expect in the whole month - including a downpour of over 24mm last Tuesday when we aborted the class!

This map of Ireland from the Met Éireann web site shows the amount of rainfall for the past week as a percentage of what we would normally expect (the garden is located in Dublin at the middle of the east coast - close to the 416% figure). It has been a very rainy period with only 1/3 of the sunshine that we would normally expect.

This diagram show how much rainfall would be needed to provide the soil with as much water as it could hold (without draining excess away). With a figure of 2mm, any more rain will start to saturate the soil, affecting plant growth. Luckily there is better weather on the way - though not great for this time of year.