As gardeners, we all need to be in tune with the climatic conditions where we live if we are to be successful. At its most simple, we probably all know whether or not we can grow tender plants, or whether our gardens are just too prone to frost and snow for them to survive.
One of the really important variables is the amount of rainfall we get. If you live in Essex or East Anglia, you may well struggle to grow plants that need lots of moisture (unless you water like crazy). However, if you live anywhere on the nation's western seaboard, you probably have more water than you know what to do with!
Over the last 7 years, I have measured the rainfall in my Sussex garden to get a better sense of how it is affecting my garden – and its wildlife. The results have really surprised me.
If you had asked me 7 years ago, I’d have predicted that the amount of rain from one year to the next would be relatively constant. Yes, we get dry spells and wet spells, but I’d have thought that things even themselves out over 365 days.
But it turns out that the rainfall is REALLY variable. The purple bars in the graph are my annual rainfall - you can see it’s a lottery whether I get 700mm (that’s 27 inches) or 1050mm (41 inches) in a year. In other words, one year can have 50% more rain than another.
The yellow bars? They're from 'Wildlife Friendly' in Devon. You can see how she gets consistently more rain than me (although her wet years pretty much correspond to my wet years). But she has even more variability - some years she must be sodden!
Interestingly, 'Wildlife Friendly' emailed me to say, "I always thought the amount of rain per year was fairly even until I started measuring it". "Snap," I said!
We know that the amount of rainfall has a huge effect on our lawns and garden plants. And in the RSPB it has a massive effect on the wildlife on our nature reserves too. So we can assume it has an effect on our garden wildlife too.
If you'd like to understand more about the weather in your garden, 'Wildlife Friendly' recommends the MetCheck Professional manual rain gauge. But if you don't want to splash out £25, a cheap funnel gauge will set you back little more than a fiver and give you fairly accurate results.
Those statistics are quite surprising, showing the numbers in graph form really shows the differences.
I wonder how much the rainfall affects the types and numbers of wildlife in our gardens. I do have lots of toads, in any one day I will find at least three. I’ve never seen a lizard, I believe they prefer the climate hot and dry.