Despite the dry summer, autumn dampness seemed to arrive just in time for a spectacular display of seasonal colour.
The autumn fungi seemed to enjoy it too, with an abundance of edible and non-edible varieties popping up around The Secret Acre.
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If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest… have a really dry year apparently… certainly some things on the smallholding have enjoyed it more than others… and not necessarily the things you might expect.
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It’s shaping up to have been a pretty good year at The Secret Acre, despite the very dry weather.
Where crops simply failed in last year’s unseasonable rain, at least the gardener has the chance to water things, especially, if like us, you live in a well-managed area like Severn Tent Water, which rarely needs a hosepipe ban.
So most things are back to growing reasonably well, even if the fruits are a bit undersized from the lack of rain.
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While we were enjoying our spring equinox BBQ earlier in the year, we were also getting round to starting the final transformation of our rebuilt ‘lean to love shack’ into a new outdoor kitchen.
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Following our unexpectedly early ‘three seasons’ spring equinox BBQ, the UK weather delivered a prolonged heatwave.
Thanks to the growing climate crisis, after last year’s continuously unseasonable cold and wet spring and summer, causing England’s England second worst harvest on record, spring 2025 could prove to be one of the hottest and driest on record. We are already suffering the most extreme marine heatwave since satellite monitoring began.
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As I write this, the UK is being battered by the second named storm this winter. Already ground sodden all last spring has returned almost instantaneously. It never really went away.
The year has basically been too cold and too wet. In record breaking amounts thanks to climate change, and the moving, possibly collapsing Gulf Stream.
England has suffered its second worst harvest on record because of the weather. If you think the damage from growing number of storms and floods in bad, just wait until we hit global food shortages.
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It’s been a quiet few weeks at The Secret Acre having been unexpectedly struck down by pestilence and plague. I spent the hottest day of the year, shivering under a duvet, unable to get warm. Annoying when there is so much to do. Hopefully we can start getting back to the harvest soon.
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And we hope you like jammin’ too… because another thing that seems to have enjoyed our unseasonably wet and cold spring/summer period is the soft fruit. Or at least some of it!
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Readers here in the UK will know that, after the wettest winter/spring on record and stubbornly cold temperatures, finally as we reach mid-summer, we might finally be getting some summer weather.
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It’s been a difficult year for plants and wildlife suffering the stuck weather systems of climate change. A worry for the extremes to come.
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The Secret Acre 