Sunniest Spring ever! Why I didn’t talk about Ryder and why I regret it.

We seem to be generating new weather records for fun these days. It's officially the most Spring sunshine ever.

Above is 20 years of accumulated sunshine data (in minutes), the top blue line is 2020 and you can see clearly how many hours of sunshine we've received this year and thats after a pretty average start to the year.

Being the inquisitive fella I am (others may just call it pedantic) I refused to believe that May has been the sunniest month ever! I know the days are pretty long now but surely the most sunshine hours ever must have fallen in June or July?

I pulled some weather data out from 2011 to now for Newbury which the MetOffice data shows as the epicentre of the highest sunlight area this May and sure enough May was exceptional. According to these figures not quite the highest ever (that looks like July 2018) but I'm happy to concede that the MetOffice figures are probably more accurate. But certainly the highest ever May by a long shot.

Couple that with a crazy dry month and very high ET it's no wonder you're all praying for rain.

May would have been a great month to test out the benefits of Ryder Turf Pigment from Syngenta, I've seen lots of great trial results where we have pushed the climatic conditions to the extreme and thats where you see the most out of it.

Most of the stress we saw was low moisture and light stress. I guess the frustrating thing is we made a concious decision not to talk about a pigment as during the Covid-19 lockdown talking about a pigment felt a little too opulant.

Turns out it was probably exactly the time we should have been talking about it.

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