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.

This is a record kept on one rented allotment plot on the northern edge of Norwich, a rod and a half of heavy loam over sand with a hawthorn hedge along the west side. The instruments are a plastic five inch rain gauge sunk so its rim stands 300 mm above short grass, a maximum and minimum thermometer in a small slatted screen at 1.25 m, and a second thermometer lying at soil level under the screen. I started in the spring of 2019 because I could not remember, two months after the event, whether the frost that took my beans had come in the second week of May or the third.

The routine is the same every day: read at 08:00 clock time, whatever the clock is doing that week, write the figures in pencil in a hardback notebook at the shed door, then copy them into a spreadsheet at the weekend. Rainfall goes in to the nearest half millimetre, temperatures to the nearest half degree, and anything else that seemed worth noting goes in a column headed remarks, which over six years has collected a great deal about hail, about ground that was too wet to dig, and about the week the gauge was full of blackfly.

I have no training in any of this and the site is not an authority on anything. It is one set of instruments, sited as carefully as an allotment allows, read by one person who occasionally oversleeps and writes the reading in as missing rather than guessing it. Where my figures disagree with the published averages for this part of the county I assume my plot is the odd one, not the county. Nothing here is for sale, nobody else is named, and the only purpose is to give next season something to argue with.