Kitchen Garden Forum

For me:

Not many pumpkins or any great size, (except the thug at home). Runners were total pants, Mooli failed to germinate from several sowings & new packets of seed, salad crops limp, hard fruit poor & most marked & no Plum Beauty as rats got them first. Missed the harvest with the soya beans & chickpeas were blind, spuds attacked by slugs despite the nemoslug treatment but chuffed they survived the blight. Pak Choy & Chinese Cabbage has an "Eat Me" sign on it for flea beetle & slugs & snails! Cucumbers kept sulking & stopping, asparagus not as fruitful as previous years and lost 2 plants, Spring onions soo slow & radishes hollow. And generally poor germination from lots of other seeds.

But today I harvested the biggest fennel I have ever grown & many more to come, beets have been a good size, carrots more or less straight & large, french beans were over quick but huge harvest, got 3 harvests of peas & broad beans from separate sowings, strawberries still producing, red & yellow raspberries also still fruiting & kale & chard have given me loads of leaves already. My total success was a couple of perfect cauliflowers & some fine cabbages & my leeks are huge compared to previous years at this time.

Oh & biggest achievement - Lottie stays where it is despite best efforts of the council! Going to take some getting used to having houses & not a farmers field behind, but he has sowed a winter crop so a bit more time of feeling rural!

My season was pretty good, fennel in the greenhouse bolted and I was too late sowing the Melon, but everything else was fine till my tatties got a bit of blight and they were pulled a month earlier than planned, still got a few though.

I've had a strange growing year although I've missed a lot of it with ongoing problems , cauliflowers have been a disaster as have broccoli , on the plus side everything else has been good the beetroot ,sweet corn, and spuds have been exceptional as have the French beans ,tomatoes are still going just about my carrots have been the best ever not been a bad year for plotting

No apples to speak of, as the frost got to the blossom. Potatoes were tiddly, complete waste of time! soft fruit wasn't too bad, and we have started new beds for all of them, as they are losing vigour. The corn was excellent, and the garlic was quite good, some a little small, but most were ok. Indoor tomatoes still producing, lettuce almost done and black kale getting nice and strong. And last but not least, We've grown the best bell peppers ever this year. They are only just ripening, but some of them are huge. One plant has 10 fruit!! (they are inside a glasshouse with a lot of panes mising after the winter storms. We covered the whole thing in scaffold mesh during the summer, this has helped I think.

My surprise for this year is it looks like after a few years of trying, I might just get a Celeriac worth pulling up.

Only three things haven't done well for me this year: radishes, blackcurrants and melons (though the melons were only an experiment, and outdoors anyway, so expectations were not great).

Just about everything else seems to have done quite well, though the beetroot have done too well - not sure what to do with beets the size of rugby balls!

Good news on your allotment Westi. Just hope the builders erect some high fences to ensure the new householders don,t come pinching your precious crops.
I,ve had a good year with climbing French beans and tomatoes (despite blight limiting my late crops. Leeks now showing increasing signs of rust unfortunatel but no room in freezer to dig them all up now and freeze them. Cauliflowers totally useless - won’t bother again. Mini cucumbers just kept coming...and coming.....and coming. My Curley kale and cavalo Nero always a useful winter standby but had to hose them today as they,re still covered in whitefly
Celeriac still quite small - think I‘ve learnt my lesson there too and after several unsuccessful attempts will leave it to the commercial growers in future.
Oh and redcurrants arrived in almost plague proportions !

My first year with 3 off 4 ft square beds using the square foot method and various pots.

Success= Tomatoes, Chillies, Peppers, Lettuce, Onion, Garlic, Broccoli, Beetroot & cauliflower Runner beans.

Part success had celery growing in with beetroot assume some wild seed got in bed with beetroot. 5 pea plants out of 15 seeds, the peas never reached the table, as soon as picked they were eaten.

Need more work with Iceberg lettuce, celery, Cucumbers & Strawberries.

Now have Green house up and running with loads of new stuff showing signs of life.

Next project is Allotment picking keys up tomorrow.

From attending a lecture at local gardening club to reading Kitchen Garden mag, getting some great advice form this forum, all in all it has been a great year for me. Thank You all.

Utter flop. Runner beans. Other plot holders done well.
Op's forgot the wonderful supply of carrots.

Successes: tomatoes, garlic, shallots, leeks, courgettes, celeriac, early broad beans, all brassicas
So-so: sweet and chill peppers, dwarf beans, potatoes
Failures: peas, later broad beans (mostly due to pheasants getting there first), beetroot+spinach (too dry early on)
We did not grow any runner beans, carrots or parsnips this year.
The annual cutting flowers were lovely, especially the dahlias, cornflowers and pot marigolds but the spray chrysanthemums have capsid bugs, I think, and most of the flowers are distorted. Our 'nectar bar' border with insect-attracting flowers were certainly the best looking bit of the allotment!

six honeydew melons and about a dozen fair sized beef tomatoes were harvested yesterday out of the polytunnel,unfortunatley not by me (rats again Grrr!)

Hundreds of French Beans (Dwarf did better than Climbers)
Scores of courgettes.
Hundreds of Tomatoes (Mainly Cherry, but plenty of bigger) No blight !

Colin - you've got an allotment - how exciting! Good luck & enjoy the new challenges! Every year is different on an allotment & even different outcomes on side by side plots. I've had a couple of poorer years on the trot but it is a case of focusing on the positives - I can grow fennel, took years but personal challenge won!

Jeff, don't start me on rats!

oh, I forgot the carrots! they were amazing this year, 1 long row of St Valery lasted us for months, I have the last few in the fridge.

Colin the first 12 months with an allotment is the hardest unless the previous owner kept on top of it until
Giving it up