garden gloom

I have resisted writing this blog post for quite a long time because it is so negative. Back in April I blogged enthusiastically about the garden and everything I’d got set up to produce food this year. Sadly, as all real gardeners know, growing things doesn’t always turn out like you hope. This year was particularly disastrous.

The herb garden wasn’t too bad, though none of the stuff that I started from seed this year came to anything. We had a few micro salads from our wall-mounted gutters, but they got very badly slug and snail infested and were very difficult to keep going.

We tried potatoes in bags again and the yield was even less worth the effort than in previous years. In fact I had to empty two bags (eight potato plants) to get enough for one meal!

We had about ten beans in all from the dwarf bean plants (the pots were better than the ones in the ground) and none of the peas made it past germination. The broad beans were pretty, but not prolific.

Most of the tomato plants drowned when we had torrential rain just after I’d put them out. I was then given three plants and this is what they produced!

We knew that the fruit probably wouldn’t really get going this year, but all the putative apples dried out and dropped off at a pretty early stage, there wasn’t enough rhubarb to pick and neither did the gooseberry or blackcurrants produce fruit.

Really the only modest success was the garlic which kept us going for a week or two.

I’ve even managed to make a disaster of the wormery compost which was just vile and I’ve had to start again, but am not convinced that it’s working any better. I thought wormeries were supposed to be easy to run!

This year’s winners were the nasturtiums which self-seeded from last year and simply took over the whole darn lot. I kept yanking them out, but finally gave up when everything else failed and let them run riot.

Finally two weeks ago Steve declared war on them and pulled them all out. The garden now looks bleak and unattractive, but I need to start thinking about next year and what might actually work.
This is a bit of a misery memoir, but I have a little bit of distance now from the really deep disappointment of getting so little reward for the effort (and money) I put in. I’ve got a lot of hopes pinned on the fruit to get going next year and I think I might move some of the herbs into the raised bed. I definitely won’t be growing from seed next year – it’s too heart-breaking when it all goes wrong.