My Area & Microclimate

When Reading Gardening Advice We Need To Bear Locality & Microclimate In Mind. My Market Garden Was On The Bedfordshire / Cambridgeshire Border, But I Now Garden Near The Coast In East Devon Where The Microclimate Is Different.

Table of Contents

The video below shows the rocks that are crucial to the red soils in my part of Devon. A few miles away, to the east, we have limestone cliffs, and to the west we have the Devon pebble beds that are the source of our pebble beaches at Budleigh Salterton (the name comes from it earlier location as a salt producing area).

On this coast, just a few miles east we find the Plats around Branscombe, famous for their early potatoes that rivalled Jersey Royals, and sometimes beat them to the London markets. The potatoes and other crops were grown on steeply sloping cliff fields and used donkeys to move the crop to the nearest railways to send them to London and other markets.

No Frosts

The centre of the town of Sidmouth rarely gets frosts. But here, just a mile inland we do. Though not normally as severe as I experienced in Bedfordshire they can devastate vulnerable crops. In the 60s severe snow cut off some households for many weeks, so it’s not always been very mild.