Sunday 20 September 2009

Indian summer to continue



BRITAIN can look forward to basking in yet more glorious sunshine as our Indian summer looks set to carry on into next month.

But let’s hope the Met Office has got its forecast right this time after a washout summer. Forecasters there faced a storm of criticism for a long range forecast earlier this year of a “barbecue summer” that never happened.

The Met Office also says that the rest of this month will see a north-south split, with the south staying relatively dry and the north becoming wetter.

Forecasters Positive Weather Solutions, which uses comparisons between current trends and past weather patterns, agrees that the rest of September will be “dry with sunshine”. And it says in the south this should continue into October.

Its forecaster Jonathan Powell said: “Bar the odd rainy day, the remainder of September will be dry with lengthy periods of sunshine. “For the south of the UK, October will start the same way – dry, sunny, but rather chilly by night.”

Despite what seemed like washout weather, it was revealed yesterday that parts of the UK have had their driest summer since 2000, with Kent getting 77 per cent of its normal rainfall between June and August.

By mid-September, southern England and East Anglia had just 24 per cent of the rainfall expected for the whole month.

The only bad news there as far as Cannas are concerned is the chilly nights, so it's time to start watching out for night-time temperatures again, and to start clearing the last of the food crops out of the poly-tunnels. There is still courgettes, potatoes, spinach, beetroot, carrots, water melons, tomatoes, chilli's and other peppers to get picked, lifted and composted before fertilizing the soil again and rotavating ready for when the Cannas need to start their hibernation.

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