Drought In Europe

[PTrosie]

And it keeps being WAY too dry here in Europe...

Anybody else's garden / farm also suffering? How are you coping with the lack of rain?

http://www.nytimes.c...20europe&st=cse

[Coast]

Where abouts are you?

[Snowangel-MK]

Anybody else's garden / farm also suffering? How are you coping with the lack of rain?

Not suffering yet but we could really do with some rain....preferably overnight or with a T-storm if it has to be during the day !!

Rainfall status for Milton Keynes: ["]http://www.mkweather.co.uk/]

Rainfall This Month

1.07 in

Rainfall This Year

6.20 in

I haven't checked against the average but I guess its a fraction of what we would normally get.

Have you got a drought problem where you are PT ? It would be useful if you put your location in your profile…..you can do this by clicking on your profile (top right hand corner), then clicking"edit profile". Add your location and save !

Edited May 25, 2011 by MKsnowangel

[Wynn D Woo]

Whilst it is relatively dry around here I wouldnt say we are in desperation at the moment, average rainfall for Gloucester in May is 45.9mm and we are currently at 29.2.

[4wd]

It's very dry here, things improved somewhat after a 13mm 'event' early in May, but after the fierce drying wind of the last few days things look very parched again.

Spring sown crops are worst affected with total failure in many cases.

An increasing worry now in this predominantly livestock area is potentially much reduced crops of hay and silage for winter feed, as grassland is struggling now too.

Last year was dry in spring too but not this bad, and the rest of the summer had reasonable but not excessive rain so poor first cuts of grass were augmented to some extent by reasonable 2nd cuts.

Meanwhile an online friend in Penrith Cumbria which is only about 60 miles due west of here complains of continual wet days making his fields too wet for heavy silaging machinery to travel without making ruts.

If a hot spell develops there will be a severe risk of major fires on the heather moorland here too.

Fires in dry summer weather are bad news as the underlying peat will also burn and it's practically impossible to extinguish until the autumn rain.

In 1976 a big fire continued to smoulder in the peat until Christmas.

Even with snow lying it was dry enough underground for the fire to continue - resulting in the strange sight of smoke rising above snowcover.

[VillagePlank]

Yes, it's getting worringly dry, now, here in the SE of England. Unfortunately, I think we need that sort of rain that drizzles for days on end, now. A cloud burst, or similar, simply won't do the trick, now.

2011

13.5mm in March

2.3mm in April

8.4mm in May

2010

34.0mm in March

16.0mm in April

27.7mm in May

which makes 2010 => 77.7mm vs 2011 => 24.2mm

Yikes! Aprrox 1/3rd of the normal rainfall.

Edited May 25, 2011 by Sparticle

[Big Innes Madori]

And it keeps being WAY too dry here in Europe...

Anybody else's garden / farm also suffering? How are you coping with the lack of rain?

http://www.nytimes.c...20europe&st=cse

Sick to the back teeth of the dammed stuff

It has rained here in some capacity every day since the 5th of May, when the good spell of weather which we had for the last couple of weeks of April ended.

Cannot go out to do anything as it is wet, cold & windy every day

Now Stormy most of this week

Costing a f****** fortune on Gas, as the central heating is on every evening and sometimes during the day while we are stuck in the house at the weekends :wallbash:

[DAVID SNOW]

Sick to the back teeth of the dammed stuff

It has rained here in some capacity every day since the 5th of May, when the good spell of weather which we had for the last couple of weeks of April ended.

Cannot go out to do anything as it is wet, cold & windy every day

Now Stormy most of this week

Costing a f****** fortune on Gas, as the central heating is on every evening and sometimes during the day while we are stuck in the house at the weekends :wallbash:

What are you trying to say?

[Guest]

What are you trying to say?

It's cold wet and windy in some parts of Europe...we can pipe oil half way across the world so why not water?? We've got plenty up here.

I saw settled fresh snow yesterday, but that's another story for another thread...:lol:

[shotski]

Hi all, has anyone any data on the gulf stream at present ? Would be interesting to see if its still in a dorment state.

Could this herald a weather change pattern for the UK, winters & summers dominated by high pressure ?

[Big Innes Madori]

What are you trying to say?

Life is just peachy at the moment David!

Big Innes.

[PTrosie]

Hello there,

Sorry, didn't check the comments for a few days...!

Well, i'm currently living in the Netherlands, in a small town near Arnhem (a place you probably never heard of :-) and helping my dutch husband who's working hard to develop his small organic farm business (mostly veggies). You would think there's always plenty of water in the Netherlands, but definitely not this year... Ooff.

We're now researching insurance possibilities to make sure he won't lose that much money again because of drought (nor because of too much rain, or frost... frustrating to be so dependent on what the weather does). If you have any advice for us, it would be very much appreciated.

Well, to be continued...

Cheers,

PT

By the way: rainfall here: 57mm since march 1st - the average is 150mm!!

[Gray-Wolf]

Hello there,

Sorry, didn't check the comments for a few days...!

Well, I'm currently living in the Netherlands, in a small town near Arnhem (a place you probably never heard of :-) and helping my dutch husband who's working hard to develop his small organic farm business (mostly veggies). You would think there's always plenty of water in the Netherlands, but definitely not this year... Ooff.

We're now researching insurance possibilities to make sure he won't lose that much money again because of drought (nor because of too much rain, or frost... frustrating to be so dependent on what the weather does). If you have any advice for us, it would be very much appreciated.

Well, to be continued...

Cheers,

PT

By the way: rainfall here: 57mm since march 1st - the average is 150mm!!

Look to the perma-culture view of growing? Don't 'till the soil, you just make many more routes for water to find it's way to the surface through capillary action and turns up weed seeds with every sod you turn. Top mulch to trap moisture in (one use for the old plastic bags) and figure a system of water delivery to the base of the plants (or buried pipe to deliver to the roots direct)

Make a 'used car/van/truck tyre' structure in a pond shape and line with pond liner/dyke liner to 'harvest' water from all your roof surfaces etc over winter to use in summer. Even consider 'trapping the water a few metres underground by sheeting under growing areas? (I take it you are on very sandy soils?) another use for those pesky shopping bags if you wish to double dig and then place a layer of bags before re-filling (and then no more digging!!!)

What I think I'm saying is look to Nature and then try to work alongside her instead of battling her?

[hugogo]

Things aren't going well in France neither. Places from the south west [bordeaux] till the most northern parts of the country [Lille] including Paris, Beauvais, Le Mans, Orleans, Poitiers and La Rochelle have remained incredibly dry for the past weeks [none of these places exceeding 5mm on the 25 first days of may]. The drought generally started in January, and some places even in wet parts of the country still havn't reached 10mm since the beginning of the year! [beauvais north of Paris, Strasbourg in the east for example].

Conditions are now becoming catastrophic in the north and west of the country. Indeed, France's climate is much more continental than England's, which means that even if the rain comes back this summer, it will mostly be under violent storms, and it will dry up in the following days under the effect of summer heat [average max are around 27-32 in the southern half of the country in July/August, 22-27 in the northern half].

French agriculture will of course suffer greatly from this lack of rain, especially corn that grows in the west and needs a lot of water, and wheat that grows in most of the northern regions of France. The unsettled weather predicted for the beginning of next week is almost the last chance for many places for the crops to grow. If the rain does not fall in sufficient quantity, since the heat is predicted to come back straight away after under a huge high pressure system, the dices will have been cast, and they'll pprobably be nothing to expect from this year's harvest...

[onlyME]

Here in Croatia drought ended in May in most of Croatia with numerous thunderstorms and some Mediterranean low pressures.Howewer,some parts of northern Croatia are still in drought.We had dry January,dry February,little below normal precipitation March,extreme dry April and little below normal precipitation to wet May.We also have warm weather.

[Ja23]

Its called summer not a drought.

[bingobob777]

I moved to Brisbane from Scotland 3 months ago and noticed this news this morning

"This morning was the fifth consecutive morning of sub-zero temperatures in Alice Springs, a new May record. The previous record May run was four mornings, in 1976."

If the world weather is really all linked and intertwined, maybe we're running into a repeat of 1976, and we all know what happened in the UK that summer.

[4wd]

I see a somewhat surprising problem is appearing in France in that the low river levels mean not only hydro-power is much reduced, but also some of their nuclear stations are not able to operate full power as they rely on river water for cooling.

[PTrosie]

Thanks for the advice Gray-Wolf. I'm actually not the agriculture specialist, my husband is (am helping him out with administration and bookkeeping), and mentioned to him what you told me. Problem remains that it just hasn't rained enough, no matter how you look at it. Since finances is what i know better, i did some research on that end, and made some interesting discoveries regarding weather insurance. I had no idea there was such a thing as weather derivatives, it's a kind of insurance, but not really (it rather is a financial product, value depending on temperature, rainfall and so on- or at least that's what i understand from it; wiki is better at explaining: http://en.wikipedia....ther_derivative )

Anyhow, i also bumped into this one website http://www.celsiuspro.com/ that lets you try this for free, which is nice because we're not sure yet to use this to balance our budget or go for more traditional insurance.

What do you guys think? Anybody has done this before?

[Snowangel-MK]

Five UK Counties In The Grip Of Drought

Five parched counties are officially suffering from drought after an exceptionally dry spring.

But despite the drought classification for Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, parts of Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Norfolk, the water shortages are not expected to prompt hosepipe bans for most areas.

The announcement was made by the Environment Agency after monitoring groundwater, rivers and in reservoirs across the country.

It follows what the Government says was the driest spring on record in South East and Central Southern England, and the driest right across England and Wales since 1990.

And for many farmers, there are now restrictions on the amount of water they can use to irrigate rain-deprived crops.

"I think the cereal crops, particularly the spring-sown ones, you are going to lose up to half your yield," said Kate Leith, whose family runs a root vegetable and cereal farm at Wantisden, Suffolk.

"Some fields will be wiped out completely and it won't be worth harvesting them at all."

Ministers are holding a summit with farmers, water companies and environmental groups to discuss the way forward.

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman said tough decisions have to be made.

"We'll look at how to prioritise who can abstract the water that we have because it's obviously really important to get that right to try and make sure that farmers have got enough to produce the crops for the food we need to eat."

And that is the worry. If crops fail, the knock-on effect is likely to be a more expensive shopping bill.

"It's adding to the upward pressures that are already there on food prices, things like the rising world demand and increasing production costs," said Richard Dodd from the British Retail Consortium .

"But I think it would be easy to exaggerate how significant it is because we rarely get a year when the weather is perfect for farmers."

At Adnams in Southwold they rely on barley. Head brewer Fergus Fitzgerald expects wholesale prices to rise by 40% compared to the cost in January. That will put 5p on a pint.

He said: "It's always a concern. I think with agricultural products it's down to the climate and weather so we know it is something we are going to have to watch.

"But obviously this year the drought has been much more widespread than it has in previous years."

By Emma Birchley, East of England correspondent | Sky News – Fri, Jun 10, 2011

[PersianPaladin]

Look to the perma-culture view of growing? Don't 'till the soil, you just make many more routes for water to find it's way to the surface through capillary action and turns up weed seeds with every sod you turn. Top mulch to trap moisture in (one use for the old plastic bags) and figure a system of water delivery to the base of the plants (or buried pipe to deliver to the roots direct)

Make a 'used car/van/truck tyre' structure in a pond shape and line with pond liner/dyke liner to 'harvest' water from all your roof surfaces etc over winter to use in summer. Even consider 'trapping the water a few metres underground by sheeting under growing areas? (I take it you are on very sandy soils?) another use for those pesky shopping bags if you wish to double dig and then place a layer of bags before re-filling (and then no more digging!!!)

What I think I'm saying is look to Nature and then try to work alongside her instead of battling her?

Some good solutions there GW. Things like heavy mulching, plant layering and swale-digging (among other things) will help to combat the drought conditions with any new crops grown. Permaculture does have a lot to offer if it is practiced carefully.

Edited June 15, 2011 by PersianPaladin