All in all it’s not been a good year in the garden. We lost our three hens to a fox in the Spring which had a big impact to our garden. The garden is a lot quieter now, and a lot less fun place to sit and relax. The hen house was starting to show some signs of weather damage so we were thinking of replacing it with something new, come the spring we’ll see if there is enough space in the garden for some new chucks and fingers crossed we’ll be eating nice organic home produced eggs once more.
On the veg front I moved my successful raspberries down to the allotment along with my blueberry bushes, and they haven’t appreciated the move and neither have shown much interest in growing. They are currently holding their own, so hopefully they are just getting used to the new location and will kick into gear next Spring.
The onions didn’t suffer the same insect attacks from last year, but it was still a fairly un-dramatic crop, and no chance of the strings of onions we managed in our first year.
The sunflowers were a great success, but they haven’t produced big enough flower heads to produce sunflower seeds for the birds to feast on. I’m sure the bees have enjoyed them however. We were only going to plant a few but so many of the seedlings survived that we ended up planting the whole length of the garden.
I’ve never tried growing main crop potatoes in the ground, it sounds like a lot of work! Instead I go for second earlies in tubs on the patio. You need to make sure they get plenty of water as they tend to dry out quickly, but being on the patio means they are very easy to put the garden hose on them. It’s really satisfying to rummage around in the tubs and fish out lovely potatoes that can go straight into the steamer for a really fresh meal. The additional benefit of a number of potato tubs is that they store potatoes very well, almost in a clamped condition. We should be eating our own potatoes for number of months yet.
I don’t know why I grow tomatoes, I’m really not a fan of eating them raw and our Summers aren’t really long enough to ripen them. If I ever get a green house I’ll have a more serious attempt at growing them. However, there is nothing like the smell of a tomato plant when it’s in full bloom. Our green tomatoes are currently under newspaper in the garage, so we’ll see how well they ripen, otherwise it’ll be green tomato chutney for us.
Another repeat offender in our garden are squashes and pumpkins. I try them every year but haven’t had much luck with growing them from seed. We tried some garden centre bought plugs this year and half of them survived and are now slowly growing fruit. Fingers crossed this year we’ll be getting some butternut squash for making some lovely autumnal soup.
I didn’t think the runner beans were going to do very well this year, they seemed to be very slow at getting any decent growth. With only a short Summer things didn’t look good, but they’ve really caught up and it looks like we’re really going to have a bumper crop. There are still plenty of flowers on the plants, so it looks like we’ll be sharing our runners with the neighbours or we run the risk of turning into a runner bean!
Every year I plant Brussel sprouts with the aim of eating our own sprouts on Christmas Day, and every year I let the side down and have nothing to show for my efforts. This year isn’t doing too badly, daily checks for butterfly eggs has kept the caterpillars at bay. Checking for eggs is very easy and only takes a minute, just look under the leaves and if you find cluster of yellow eggs just run your fingernail across them and you’ll get them all off the leaf. The eggs won’t hatch on the ground so you can just flick them onto the soil. By doing this you can avoid the more icky task of trying to catch catepillers. There is a good guide with some photos here. We’ll now see if this year will see our first sprout harvest on Xmas morning.
