Coping with the heat
A friend’s kind offer of an air cooler has been gratefully received by my onions!
It has been so hot for so long that watering has been my son Alwyn’s and my main occupation recently. Porthmadog, which is just 40 minutes away, was the hottest place in the UK for three days running, so it shows you how much heat we’ve had to contend with.
My main concern are the large onions and leeks in my smallest tunnel. Even with the double doors at both ends fully open and the side curtains up, the temperatures were regularly in the high 30s. The first thing I did was cover over the tops of the leeks to guard the flags from being burnt through.
The onions are the best I’ve ever had and on the last weekend in June there were a few already at 58cm (23in) diameter. I did notice though that the high temperatures were starting to take their toll, with the tips of the onion leaves dying back even though the soil was perfectly moist.
In an attempt to improve things I set up a fan at the far end, which didn’t do much to be honest! Talking to my friend Jack Jones about the heat problem he said that he had won an air cooler in a raffle some years back and it had never been used. As good friends do, he said ‘I’ll bring it over as soon as I can as your onions are much better than mine’.
The cooling unit came in two parts, with the cooler sitting on top of a 20 litre tank with a pipe going from the bottom of the cooler to the tank. I set it up at the far end of the polytunnel on the same day and set it to run for eight hours, from around 9am until 5pm. This improved things by a few degrees, not a lot, but it still has to be better for the plants. Time will tell, and thanks Jack for being so generous! ● Follow me on Twitter - @medwynsofangles.