Plain Jane was a far more welcome guest than Harvey

Country Living with Francis Farragher

We’ve now officially slipped quite seamlessly into the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, with our climatological summer ending on the last day of August. The summer of 2017 has slipped by with mixed reviews and while it didn’t give us any prolonged settled spells, at least we had very little by way of washouts. It was a real mixed bag.

For those of us who still chance making a bit of hay there were two decent enough interludes around the mid-June and early-July periods where it was dry enough to get the baler into action, but apart from those two windows of opportunity, the latter part of the summer season was dank enough.

From the second half of July onwards, our weather did tend to more wet than dry and while the amounts of rainfall on a daily basis weren’t substantial, the cumulative impact as we said goodbye to August was that soils had turned a lot softer.

We were probably all a little spoiled by one of our driest April periods over the past half-century with total rainfall amounts for the month barely touching the half-inch mark in the West of Ireland.

Abbeyknockmoy weather recorder Brendan Geraghty had only three days in April when any rainfall occurred – the 3rd, 14th and 29th – while his May measurement of 2.81 inches was well below the average too.

We did enjoy quite an extended dry spell through the middle of June – from the 11th to 22nd – when the rainfall gauge stayed empty but it was wettish at the start and end of the month, giving the month a total of 4.15 inches.

Brendan Geraghty also recorded quite a dryish fortnight at the start of July but from the 18th onwards there was rain most days with quite a deluge on the 20th of the month when 1.15 inches fell.

August also brought us 20 wet days, although generally the daily falls were modest enough and we did have quite a nice dry period between the 25th and the 29th.

Overall, our eighth month of the year brought 3.9 inches (99mms.) to Brendan Geraghty’s rain gauge, and although we’ve all complained about August being on the wet side, the rainfall figure was bang on the average for the month.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.