Out next challenge is to survive the Ides of March

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Well February has come and gone – generally benign and reasonably dry, although it did deliver a fair sting in the tail with a really cold blast over its final few days and some heavy bursts of wintry rainfall as well.

One of the little mysteries of weather is how, after our driest month since last September, that land is still extremely wet but this is down to what we might describe as the cumulative impact of consecutive wettish months.

Since our glorious September of 2014, the rainfall pattern has gone back to its old ways with October, November, December and January all pretty wet months, so despite the best efforts of February, it has singularly failed to dry up our fields.

Abbeyknockmoy weather man Brendan Geraghty recorded just 2.27 inches of rainfall during the 28 days of February with its first 12 days completely dry, but between the 24th and the 28th, over an inch of rain fell.

A lot of the damage in terms of saturating land was caused by the snowfall on the night/morning of Monday, March 2 and 3, when the impact of the melting snow really left land soft and slushy for last week.

According to Brendan Geraghty, four wettish months in a row from October to January, have left most soils saturated, although he did note that our second month this year was nearly three times as dry as February, 2014, when we had 6.61 inches of rainfall.

“I suppose the hope now is that March will continue pretty dry and mild. We need the land to dry up but we also need a pick-up in temperatures to kick-start growth for the Spring season. March is always a very important month from the point of view of getting growth going,” said Brendan Geraghty.

Our friends in the Teagasc farm advisory service, tell us that there is really little point in spreading early nitrogen to boost growth, until soil temperatures at least reach 5 Celsius, and over recent weeks, the Met Eireann stats indicated that soils are struggling to reach that figure.

The lengthening days and a little blow from the warm south can make all the difference to stimulating growth in March, but the last thing we need in our third month of the year is a biting wind from the east, something that we experienced in the wicked Spring of 2013.

There are times when we can get fixated about rainfall being the be-all and the end-all of weather as we know it, but it is well worth recalling that March, 2013 was a very dry month with the NUI Galway weather station recording less than 40mms. of rainfall (well under 2 inches).

However the ‘Beast from the East’ blew in a bitingly cold and hostile wind that gave our grasslands a whitish, red hue, with barely a hint of green to be seen anywhere. That year, growth didn’t really recover until June, as most farmers will need no reminding of, when hay and fodder had to be imported from the UK and the Continent.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.