End of Season review: the disasters…

My previous end of season post here talked about the successes – but of course there were the disasters too.

No pictures to show my lack of beetroot this year – I tried several times, firstly sowing straight into the raised bed (where later the butternut squash and cucumber plants were rampant, so it wasn’t the soil!). When that didn’t work, twice, I tried growing the seedlings in little pots first – that worked up to the point when I put them in the bed. I suspect creatures of eating them, but not sure whether it was slugs or mice.

So, beetroot was firmly off the menu.

Another sad and sorry attempt at a crop were the courgettes. The plants seemed to thrive but I didn’t manage to harvest a single courgette, they started well then shrivelled and died.

And then there were the strawberries – all leaf and no berry sadly. Same for the blueberries, but in both cases, I suspect avian theft…

Carrots weren’t a total disaster, I did get one crop albeit a bit misshapen, nothing worthy of the show bench 😉 But there were a couple of sowings that just didn’t come up at all, so my plan to have a regular crop of carrots throughout the season didn’t work and I certainly can’t count them in the successes.

Broad beans were another partial success – they flourished for a while and we had a good
harvest until the dreaded rust hit, which was a shame.

And finally for the disaster story – peas. Put several plants in one of the raised beds but none of them thrived there. I had better luck with a single seedling in a plant pot which I left in the greenhouse but we didn’t really get enough for a good helping of fresh peas from the garden – delicious though.

But in spite of all the failures and not quite successes, I did have plenty of successful crops to redress the balance and have high hopes for next year with half an allotment to fill up as well as the raised beds at the bottom of the garden. Not quite the Good Life yet, but we’re getting there…

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