I’ve been growing vegetables in our garden for years now. I usually end up putting the garden “to bed” for the winter towards the end of September. Harvesting the last bits of produce, weeding out the vegetable patches and covering up the earth until the Spring.
I thought I’d also do a bit of a retro to help me reflect on what worked and what didn’t work so well this year. We’ve had some mixed successes, so there are some things to reflect and improve on.
What did I set out to do this year?
This year I wanted to do a few things:
- Grow some different vegetables
- Get more produce out of the garden
- Have fewer gluts of a single item (no more courgettes!) and limits on wastage
- Have a more continuous harvest
What changes did I make?
To help achieve my goals, I made the following changes this year:
- Make some of the planting denser, to try and get more into the same space
- Plant some vegetables in pots and not just the vegetable patches, to make sure of all available growing space
- Tried to germinate and plant out seedlings as early as possible
- Have several plantings of some vegetables, to allow me to harvest blocks of vegetables over a longer period. To help with this I produced a planting layout for each bed at the start of the year
- Pay closer attention to the dates when produce was due to be ripe, by creating a Google calendar of expected harvest dates
- Bought some new seeds, as I had a lot of older seeds
What did we grow?
The final list for this year was (new things in bold):
Basil, Butternut Squash, Carrots, Coriander, Cucumber, Lettuce, Pak Choi, Peas, Potato, Radish, Shallots, Spinach, Spring Onion, Sweetcorn
So, not as many new vegetables as I’d hoped, but I did try some different varieties.
What went well?
- Had a great harvest overall, including about a kilo of fresh peas, 6kg of potatoes, couple of dozen cucumbers, great crop of spring onions and carrots
- Having the calendar to help guide planting of seeds and planting in blocks across different beds. This definitely helped to limit gluts and spread out the availability of veg
- Denser planting of peas and giving them a little more space worked well
- Grew a really great lettuce
- Freezing the peas immediately after harvesting, so we could spread out use
- Making pickled cucumbers and a carrot pickle to preserve some of the produce
- Using Nemaslug (as usual) to keep the slugs at bay. Seriously, this is my number 1 gardening tip
- Spring onions grew just fine in pots
- Spinach harvest was great. None of it went to waste
- Being able to go to the garden and pick radish, spinach, carrots, spring onion and pak choi and throw them in the wok for dinner was amazing
What didn’t go so well?
- Germinated and planted out 2-3 different sets of sweetcorn, squash and cucumber plants. Ended up losing them all in early frosts. Nothing more frustrating than seeing things die within a day or so of planting out
- Basil just didn’t properly germinate or grow this year. Tried 3-4 plantings, end up with a couple of really scrawny plants. Not sure what happened there. They were in pots but were reasonably well watered.
- Lost some decent lettuces to snails
- Radish crop was pretty poor. Some good early harvest, but later sets were poor. I think I used some old seed. The close planting and not enough thinning also meant the plants ended up “leggy” and not growing sufficient bulbs
- Tried coriander indoor and outdoor with mixed success. Like the radishes, they were pretty stringy. Managed to harvest some leaves but in the end, left them to go to seed and harvested those
- Sweetcorn, after a did get some to grow, weren’t great. Had some decent cobs on a few, but weakest harvest ever. Normally super reliable.
- Spinach, Pak Choi and some Radishes went to bolt. So didn’t get the full harvest I might have done
- Cucumbers I grew from seed. But ended up getting a couple of dozen from basically a single monster plant which spread all over the place. So, still had a massive glut of them. There are 7 in the kitchen right now.
- Crap shallot harvest. Had about half a dozen
What will I do differently?
- Thin the radishes more, use the early pickings in salads
- Don’t rush to get the seedlings out too early in the year. This is the second year in a row where I’ve lost plants early on. Make sure to acclimatise them to the outdoors for longer
- Apply Nemaslug at least twice, not just once a year at the start of the season
- Try to find a way to control the slugs
- While I watered regularly when it was very hot, I got lax when we had a wet period. Suspect this may have contributed to some plants going to bolt
- Need to rotate stuff through the beds next year, to mix up planting
- Look at where I can do companion planting, e.g. around the sweetcorn
- Going to expand the growing patch. The kids have outgrown their trampoline, so will be converting more of garden to beds next year
- Add another 1-2 compost bins
Main thing I want to do next year is get a green house. I’ve got my eye on this one. I want to grow tomatoes, chillis and peppers. It’ll also help me acclimatise some of the seedling before properly planting out.
Having the space to grow vegetables is a privilege and I’m very glad and very lucky to have the opportunity.
Gardening can be time consuming and frustrating, but I love being able to cook with what I’ve grown myself. Getting out into the garden, doing something physical, seeing things grown is also a nice balm given everything else that is going on.
Looking forward to next year.
Lost Boy 