2010 successes - home garden

Well, 2010 is not over yet, but we're transitioning into the colder autumnal darkness. Worth marking what were the successes and failures in the summer garden this year.


Upside down tomatoes - not prolific, but no blight. They are starting to ripen now. Yummy!
Courgettes doing great. Onions and shallots were fab - all harvested, dried and stored.
Some potatoes that self seeded produced a huge crop in a raised bed, and the spuds in pots yielded reasonably.
Garlic got rust, but it seems to be fine - lots stored, and lots saved for planting more in a month or so - will plant loads of hard neck garlic.

Sunflowers in a pot are great - just about to bloom. The cherries ripened, and were very small and tasty in September. No Damsoms. No pears - a few apples on one of the trees.

Lettuces did great in window boxes until July.
Beetroot didn't do so well. Carrots were a dead loss. Sunflowers in the front bed were decimated by slugs when they were several feet tall. Also wasps were harvesting cellulose from other sunflowers and weakened the stem, so the wind blew them over.

We saw lots of butterflies, bees and other bugs in the garden - which was great, the long hard winter would have decimated them. We will leave our teasel to provide homes for them again this year.

The tall beans are getting decimated by the wind - as always - but some nice borlottis growing there.

I have planted a lot of daikon and corn salad for the winter - and the leeks seem to be doing well. Have planted spinach also, it has germinated and is thriving in seed trays.

The home garden was neglected a little in favour of the allotment, and I have left a lot of leeks to go to see to save seed - they have now occupied the same area for > 12 months, so a good weeding is in order. The seeds don't seem to be turning into the small black seeds that I would expect - anyone know anything about saving leek seeds?