Relying on hot memories to sustain us through the Winter

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Definitely, there’s no pleasing everybody, when it comes to weather. On a grand soft Autumn evening last week, as I sloped into the local for one or two beverages, one of the regulars was moaning about the awful weather. He must have been having a bad day. Here we were, following our best Summer for decades; after getting growthy dashes of rain for the past month that had greened our countryside; and he wasn’t happy over the fact that the sun wasn’t splitting the stones near an 8pm sunset in early September.

One of the strange quirks of our Irish weather is that often our annual rainfall total often come in around the same figure every year with one or two very wet months being cancelled out by a couple of dry ones. And one thing about weather: it tends to be all about the present moment. Memories of wet months, dry spells or storms tend to be wiped out by what’s happening in ‘the now’, and maybe that explained the little rant from my friend in the local the other night.

So, this year, we might all be forgiven for thinking that we are having an especially dry year, but Abbeyknockmoy weather recorder, Brendan Geraghty, who assiduously keeps detailed records of rainfall trends, has done a little comparison of the statistics for the first eight months of the past three years.

Rather, surprisingly the first eight months of 2017 were marginally drier than the first two thirds of this year – 24.12 inches as compared to nearly to 25 inches – but statistics do tend to play their own tricks with these things. The ‘distortion’ this year comes about because of our wet January (Brendan Geraghty recorded 7.25 inches) but since then, the trend – and especially so since last May – has been for drier conditions to prevail.

Here in the West though, we really cannot complain too much about how things have worked out weather wise this year. Just when we needed it most, the rains arrived in August, with Brendan Geraghty recording four inches of precipitation for our eighth month. At the Met. Éireann station in Athenry, the figure was even higher at almost five inches, making it our wettest month by a long way since last January.

As Brendan Geraghty points out, the dividend from this wettish August, has been a quite phenomenal recovery in our growth patterns, with second cuts of silage over recent days and weeks, producing quite a decent return of round bales. Grass is just a wonder crop in terms of recovery: near the end of July baked fields looked as if they would never be green again, but six weeks later, there’s a rich lushness about them. The heat of course was still in the soil (even last week soil temperatures at around the 15° to 16° Celsius mark), so when a few bags of nitrogen were thrown into the equation, the perfect mix was there for a recovery in grass growth.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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