Anyone feel like it’s been raining a lot recently? How does your garden grow??

It certainly feels to us like it’s shaping up to be another mild, wet summer this year.  So we started wondering what we could learn about the climate, and how it might be affecting grounds maintenance?

The Met Office published a press release in June showing that it had been one of the wettest Junes on record with 150% of the average monthly rainfall, and temperatures also 1.5degC higher than the average.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/2017/wet-and-warm-june-comes-to-a-close

July’s summary from the same website suggests more of the same….“The first half of the month was warm in the south-east but cool in the north-west, and it was mostly warm and sunny on the 17th and 18th, followed by a thundery breakdown.  From the 21st it was wet and often quite cool, with some heavy persistent rain at times especially in the south, while in Scotland and Northern Ireland the weather was mostly bright and showery.”

We look forward to seeing August’s data, but it certainly feels like our teams have had good use out of their waterproofs so far…

So there’s some evidence certainly of interesting weather patterns and a warm, wet summer.

@pasturebase Ireland publish some interesting data on how climate is affecting grass growth and we were struck by the twitter post below showing grass growing rate and how it has varied in the past couple of years.

Whilst it looks like spring 2015 saw faster growth, summer 2016 (May-Aug) overtook 2015, with rapid growth in May in particular.  So far in 2017, it looks like the grass is growing faster again.  OK this is Ireland, not the UK, but here at Envirocare we mow 6759km of grass stripes every week and this feels right to us!

Our Envirocare Grounds Maintenance programmes – Green leaf, Silver leaf, and Gold leaf, are designed to provide more maintenance (and grass mowing!) when things are growing faster, whilst offering our clients a choice about how much work and investment they want to make in the upkeep of their grounds.  Have a look at http://www.envirocarems.co.uk/Packages#.WZaoACiGPIU to see how we adjust our frequency during the season.

We can also tailor packages to suit specific requirements – just let us know if you’re interested in this and we’ll arrange for one of our experts to visit and make recommendations.