Gauge rim 300 mm above short grass / screen thermometer at 1.25 m / read at 08:00 and credited to the day before
Readings
Daily rainfall and minimum temperature readings from an allotment plot in Norwich: frost dates over five seasons, water butt yields and what the record changed about sowing.
I read a rain gauge and a maximum and minimum thermometer on one allotment plot in Norwich at eight every morning, and I keep the figures so that what I remember about a season has to agree with what I wrote down.
EntrySubjectLength
19 Jul 20262026
Season notes
June 2026 delivered more than twice my six year average rainfall on this plot. Here is what the daily figures show, and what changed about my sowing dates as a result.
8 Jun 20252025
Water
Measured roof area, six years of rainfall figures and the gap between the litres that should arrive in the butts and the litres that really do.
19 May 20242024
Frost
Air frost and ground frost dates from 2020 to 2024 on a single Norwich plot, the cold corner by the hedge, and why the county average was three weeks out for me.
23 Apr 20232023
Method
Six years of morning readings on one allotment, what siting a rain gauge badly cost me, and the second gauge four metres away that disagreed by a fifth of the total.
A single allotment gauge is not a weather station and this is not a forecast. What it is good for is settling arguments with my own memory. The season I was certain had been the wettest turns out to be the fourth wettest of six, and the frost that took my beans was three weeks later than I would have sworn to.
Every figure here came off an instrument I can walk up to, at 08:00, in whatever the weather was doing at the time. Where a morning was missed the notebook says so and the gap stays a gap. That is the entire method, and it is the only claim this record makes for itself.