May has been a very moody month. From very high-temperature jumps to storms with very huge temperature falls, May has proven once more to be one of the most unstable months of the year. Although this May has been much warmer than usual, with summer temperatures, the storms brought us almost above-average rainfall. With 97 liters of rain, this was one of the rainier months of this year, and not a single liter was extra. We needed this rain. The last week’s weekend rain was actually the first normal rain in months. It started falling slowly and kept falling for 3 days. For the first time, the soil was actually soaked instead of being just surface wet. 

When it comes to temperature, we were well above average almost every day of the month. Temperatures have been summer, with a maximum of 32.5°C (90.5°F). Morning temperatures have been around normal, with a couple of big jumps, but the minimum value never got under 7°C(44.6°F). We had a couple of almost March days at the end of the month, with a daily maximum of only 11.4°C(52.5°F) on Sunday, but this quickly changed, and we’re already back to warm nights and sunny afternoons.

This year has been different, my garden is not too far behind the rest of the village gardens. Seedlings might be a bit smaller than the rest, but that’s because they are homegrown. The rest of the vegetables are growing like in the best sun-exposed gardens. Not even the drought period of 14 days did any damage or difference. Sure, I did water the garden to help the plants survive, but they didn’t look too heatstroke.

We did get a couple of major storms this month, the month started with a strong hazelnut hailstorm, which was luckily mixed with rain, so I didn’t make a lot of damage. The biggest damage was to the side garden peppers and the lettuce in the onion/lettuce bed. The second storm was a rainstorm with strong winds, which managed to flood the garden and the new beds, luckily the garden is on a steep hill so the rain was simply washed down and the flat beds got their improvised rain protection after that incident. The rest of the month was luckily much calmer. 

All in all, this was not a bad month. We did worry a lot about the storms and the damaging winds, but at least there was no frost danger, which would be much worse than a normal storm. The garden is looking good and the nice weather helped us get closer to the end of the major side garden work. We’ll see what June has in store for us.