This year was our first in our current home with our rather large garden. We moved into this house in May, and although we were late out with many of our crops, we’ve had a very successful growing season. In this post we’ll look back over the year and share where we feel we were successful, and where we were not.
Soft Fruits
By far our largest and most used soft fruit crop was our plums. We can’t really take much credit for this crop, as all of the trees were already here when we moved in, and we have done little other than use the fruits. However, we’d like to think we’ve used them successfully. As well as eating them fresh, we made jams, chutneys and a gallon of wine from these plums. We look forward to finding even more uses for them next year.
One of our plum trees laden with fruit.
A neighbour very kindly donated us several batches of apricots. We ate some fresh, they were delicious, very sweet. The remainder we preserved in three different ways, by making jam, bottling and by making wine.
We have two potted small blueberry bushes and one bush each of redcurrants and blackcurrants which we brought with us. Due to my lack of pruning the blackcurrant bush didn’t fruit this year, but we got respectable yields from both the blueberries and the redcurrants. We also let some blackberry bushes grow on the border of our vegetable patch and these provided us with blackberries for jam and fruit leather, posts about this can be found here and here. An elder tree on the edge of our vegetable patch also gave us a fair few elderberries.
Our strawberries also thrived this year. We, or more accurately the children, had plenty to eat fresh and we have many runners to start a new generation of plants. Our ‘Cambridge Favourite’ plants have sent out loads of runners, but the ‘Albion’ ones unfortunately haven’t.
Finally, although we are yet to get anything edible, and our categorisation of them as soft fruits may be questionable, we did sow three rhubarb seeds which have given us young plants. We plan to start a soft fruit patch next year, and these rhubarb plants will join the currant bushes there. We will probably look to expand into other soft fruits that we haven’t grown before. We may also move some of the ‘Albion’ strawberry plants there too in the hope that life outside of a pot may be more conducive to runner generation.
Hard Fruits
We brought four potted apple trees here with us and two of these gave us a few apples, the other two (the youngest trees) didn’t. However, there is an established apple tree in the garden which has given us plenty of apples. Our neighbours also donated windfall apples, which we used in various recipes, such as this crumble recipe and the aforementioned fruit leather. We were also fortunate enough to be invited to help ourselves to apples from a local organic orchard, thanks to the kind people of our local eco group. All in all it has been a great year for apples.
An apple tree at the local organic orchard we visited with our local eco group.
A whopping great cooking apple fresh from the tree at the local organic orchard.
We don’t have a pear tree, but a neighbour kindly gave us a basket of pears, a few of which we ate fresh, the majority we preserved and posted about here. This year we grew our first ever quince, which we thoroughly enjoyed, and posted about here. We also grew our first ever medlar. Our potted dwarf medlar tree was new this year, and hopefully it will produce higher yields in the future.
Legumes
Overall we were happy with our legumes this year. We grew four types: runner beans, black beans, peabeans and a heritage variety of peas, ‘Champion of England’. The peas were an absolute failure. I’ve not idea why, we’ve grown the variety before, from the same batch of seeds, and been successful. Yes, the seeds were old, but they germinated. The plants didn’t seem happy at all. Some understandably so, as it took us a while to prepare the soil and they were rather pot-bound before they were planted out. But they produced very few pods, and then seemed to succumb to a mildew-based ailment.
We had more luck with the beans, with all three types producing a very respectable harvest. We planted 19 runner bean plants in total and these in particular provided us with a considerable crop. We consumed many runner beans fresh and also preserved them using three methods: freezing, Salting and Pickling. So we still have further runner beans to consume even though the plants have long since died.
Brassicas
I think it’s fair to say that we failed at brassicas this year. Aside from a few swedes which didn’t really fill out, we can boast just two kohlrabies this year. However, we never really did get going with the brassicas. After the getting the swedes in the ground we focussed on more urgent plant families and by the time we were back round to brassicas again it was too late in the year to warrant planting them. We did however get a few small swedes from the allotment, although we can take little credit for those, as my dad did almost all of the work.
Our 2015 brassicas – top row are some examples of our swedes which never filled out. Bottom row (l-r), some swedes from the allotment, a kohlrabi from the garden.
Root Veg
A mixed bag here. We were delighted with our beetroots, of which we have already eaten many and still have more in the ground as we come to the end of this exceptionally mild December. We planted just four parsnips which we germinated in paper pots and were quite concerned after their tap roots coiled in them before we had prepared the vegetable patch. We lost one of these parsnips when I accidentally pulled it up whilst weeding. However, the remaining three all filled out and we were very pleased with them.
Strangely our carrots didn’t come to much. We’ve grown carrots before and never had any problems. Our seed was old, the newest being from last year, but that shouldn’t have been a problem. I did see our son playing in the area I planted them, so maybe they got trodden too deep to germinate. I guess we’ll never know. We had just one carrot, and when I pulled it up there was nothing of it. However, this didn’t stop us from experimenting with carrots, as a cheap batch of feed carrots tempted us into making carrot wine.
We didn’t grow many potatoes this year, just a few tubers in small grow sacks in the front garden. However, we were pleasantly surprised with the number of potatoes that we got from them. Our garlic harvest this year was quite disappointing. For the last two years we have been growing the variety ‘Solent Wight’ and we have been very happy with it. However, this year the bulbs were very small. We’ll still use them of course, but it did mean that we decided against planting out any of our homegrown cloves for next year’s crop.
This year’s garlic harvest – disappointingly small bulbs.
Miscellaneous
This is where we had the most success. Regular readers will have already read about the abundance of courgettes we had. We used these in a variety of ways, enjoying them in our dinners probably every other day. Our children’s favourite was courgette pizza. We also used them in vegetable curries, simply griddled in olive oil and preserved them in chutneys and a jam. However our favourite was definitely using our spiralizer. Armed with this gadget we made the courgettes a staple part of our diet, using them as a spaghetti substitute. Spiralized and served with a herby tomato sauce they made half a meal on their own. We have this model and can highly recommend it: Lurch Spirali 10203 Vegetable Spiralizer Green/Cream
We also had success with other members of the curcubit family. We had planned to grow ‘Paris Pickling’ cucumbers to make our own gherkins. However, we struggled to keep on top of them and just ended up peeling them and using them in salads. We also grew a few patty pans and a plethora of winter squashes, of which we were very proud, please see the post here for more details on that subject. We also had decent crops of tomatoes, lettuce and herbs.
Last but not least, let’s not forget the mushrooms. We’d never grown mushrooms before and this year we decided to give them a go. We were delighted with the set we bought, and posted about them here, here and here.
In Conclusion
In the context of how late we were to start the garden this year, we think we were quite successful. Aside from plants we were growing in pots from last year (i.e. our dwarf fruit trees, our garlic, soft fruit bushes and a few herbs), we didn’t sow our crops until we moved into our home in May. We spent quite a lot of time getting on top of the garden. Firstly we cleared the vegetable patch, as documented here. We also installed some guttering and a water butt beside the vegetable patch.
Probably our biggest project was clearing the turf from what became our vegetable patch. We transformed this area by the very slow process of digging our strips of grass, then turning the soil, then digging in manure. Eventually we had a sizeable patch ready for our precious curcubits, of which we were of course ultimately very proud.
Whilst all this was going on we were still sowing and watering and performing all of the other jobs that were required in the garden. If we had of been able to spend several days solid out there it would probably not have taken long, but trying to fit it into evenings and weekends whilst we were still unpacking indoors was quite a challenge.
As we now approach the final hours of 2015 and look back we are happy with what we have achieved and we are looking eagerly forwards to the new year and new growing season. With a whole year in the garden we are sure we can achieve more. We will of course be sure to share what we get up to. And so we would like to end this post by wishing our readers a very happy new year.