Let’s talk about the weather
October 24th, 2007 - Posted in Kaimata Croft, sustainable living - by Sarah|
As well as being environmentally conscious here at the Croft, living in a caravan means that we are also constantly conscious of our environment. For example, when there is a heavy rainstorm in the middle of the night we wake up and spend a few hours listening to the rain drumming on the roof. Our lives have become completely dominated by the vagaries of the weather and as this is Spring, the season of uncertainty, it has become very difficult to plan what we are going to do from one hour to the next, let alone a day in advance.
Hail stones on the caravan awning.
We have definitely noticed a micro-climate here. We get less rain than Hokitika and less mist and fog than Greymouth. We are very sheltered from the cold Southerlies but the Northwest wind can whistle in and fling about anything that’s not weighted down. During the winter we only had a few days of frost and the amount varied quite a lot. There was hardly any on the terrace but there were a couple of dips down on the paddock where it crunched underfoot and lingered for most of the day. To compensate we had lots of beautiful clear sunny days.
Midwinter sunrise from our building platform.
In an attempt to build up our own understanding of the weather here we have set up a weather monitoring station and linked it to the computer. We’ve even linked it to this website (click here) but this will only be updated sporadically until we have a permanent home to set it up in. We also check the met service website at least once a day although we often find that the forecast for today changes to reflect what we’ve already observed rather than predicting what’s going to happen before it does.
The West Coast is of course renowned for its liquid sunshine with parts getting an average of 7 metres per year. Here it’s more like 2 metres per year and since we’ve been living on site rainfall has actually been well below average. The river has only flooded its banks once and came nowhere near our paddock. Our stream rises and fall rapidly as it has a fairly small catchment area. We hope to add a micro hydro generator to it in a couple of years (when we’ve got some time on our hands) but will only be able to use it when the water level is high.
Our stream running high.
Unless it’s actually bucketing down we tend to spend all our time outdoors and the sunshine has been warm enough for us to sit and eat lunch outside for a couple of months now. Yesterday the temperature got up to 30 degrees C and we have to watch the greenhouse carefully to avoid frizzling the tomatoes. On the other hand we have had a few clear and cold nights recently too – the coldest got down to 1 degree C. The Borlotti beans seem to be able to handle this but we may end up losing the Purple Tee Pees as a result. One day we will have our weather station set up to beep at us when the temperature drops or rises too much, or the wind or rain gets too heavy so we can rush outside to take whatever protective action our plants require. We won’t even need to look out of the window to keep an eye on the weather anymore!
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