Taking stock

At my suggestion, I snipped off some mint to add to our home-cooked meal tonight. Susan quietly threw it away, telling me later she didn't think it was mint and it just didn't seem right. Obviously past its best and a reminder that the season has grown to a conclusion.

Time to take stock and examine the failures and successes of this year and what I can learn from them.

1. Potatoes - absolutely brilliant. But I need to plant more than one variety.
2. Courgettes - three plants in pots produced about half a courgette between them, but the one planted outside in the soil has been wonderful. It's producing even now.
3. Raspberries - about five grew, a welcome gift for the birds. Bushes dug up after two seasons of failure with them.
4. Rhubarb - continues to baffle me. We've had about one pudding this year from the two crowns in the garden. Susan says it's because I don't feed them.
5. Spinach beet - has done OK.
6. Tomatoes - a major disappointment after being such a winner last year. The outdoor plants caught blight early on and had to go. The plants in the conservatory were hardly big producers. The lesson I have learned is to use growbags rather than pots and to stay away from heritage seeds. They're heritage for a reason, I feel. Mainstream toms for me next summer.
7. Broccoli - doing all right, although it was my friend Kate who started them off before giving them to me as a present.
8. Pak choi - a waste of time. Has failed to grow.
9. Mizuna - also not very successful. Failed to grow outdoors, the indoor pot produced just a few leaves and then stubbornly refused to grow more.
10. Squash - nothing doing from the single plant in the conservatory.
11. Herbs (that's thyme, oregano & basil) - fairly successful, although I don't think we've utilised them to their full extent in our cooking.
12. Broad beans - blighted.
13. Cherokee Trail of Tears beans - about two handfuls produced, a bitter disappointment. 

More failures than successes, but I'm not crying. I'll be trying even harder next year.

Lessons? More effort needed, composting needed, I should learn to propogate more plants in the conservatory rather than planting seed directly in the ground and I must ditch the back plot where I put the broad beans and the Cherokee Trail of Tears this year. The sun just doesn't shine there and also it is very stony, this being the land where they did a lot of quarrying in the past. I plan on digging out a further patch elsewhere in the garden.