Successes and failures 2020

Good; Gooseberries,strawberries,rasps,charlotte potatoes,black bamboos,treeferns,palms.
Average; Blueberries,elephant garlic,olive trees,tomatoes.
Poor; Garlic, Still cant get the plum or Asian pear to set fruit, and the Sago's still look dead
Roll on 2021 :bigthumb:

 

Good: ( after a dodgy start) Potatoes, baby sweetcorn, cucumbers, chillies, squash, melons, courgettes, carrots, beetroot, Eriobotrya ( loquat), pears, citrus, oleander ( no rain to spoil the flowers), hemerocallis, lilies, dierama and platycodon.
Disaster: 3 apple trees and 4 cherries dead, drownded. Strawberries nicked by moorhens, no coriander or spinach, iris decimated by slugs and snails. Couch grass finally took over the 'lawn' but it got it's come-uppance today :-)

 

My good neighbour grows his many coloured iris plants without any visible damage. He gave me some lilac one's last year and the slugs were straight at mine... He must have greater skills.
One day after I'd had a particularly bad caterpillar attack to the brassicas, i asked him if he'd had any problems to which he cheerfully said 'no'.
His garden is like Monty Dons (but smaller)
Having said that he is ALWAYS out there lol, and I'd bet no critter escapes his dedicated eyes.

 

Thanks for sharing your failures as well as your successes, guys!

We have lots of new members to the forum, many of whom are new to gardening too. I think it is comforting to know that even experienced gardeners have failures, be it down to weather, poor seeds/compost, or just bad luck!

The secret to gardening, IMHO, is to keep on trying, to try to work out what might be causing your problems - maybe with others’ help, and sometimes - to try growing something else!

 

I also want to thank you all for sharing your failures and successes. I am less experienced than most of you as I started spending much more time on gardening when I retired. I became more greedy for the last 2 years buying and planting more plants. Unfortunately all my new plants are in pots because the garden is very small and more than half is covered with tiles.
So my failures:
3 blueberry plants without blueberries,
3 dwarf peach trees without peaches though at least they had beautiful flowers in spring,
2 goji berry plants without berries,
5 black current and 1 red current plants with about 15 berries,
3 honeyberry bushes with about 15 berries,
4 cherry trees with some cherries mostly eaten by birds.
But I still hope that next summer I will manage to get a lot of berries and cherries from my plants. At least cherry trees and peach trees are beautiful in blossom in spring.

 

My failures have been mainly fruit trees. The apple trees, in particular, have been unproductive this year with a pathetic yield. One of my plum trees was good and has produced a fair amount of fruit for the past three years but the other planted at the same time with the same amount of care produced 3 plums this year for the first time ever. I've never had success with gooseberries so have given up on them now.
I don't bother with growing vegetables because I can buy them fresh and cheap from a man round the corner who has a large garden and grows all I need. His produce is far superior from anything that I've ever grown.
My veg beds are now my cutting garden which is full of colourful flowers and makes me happy. I would far rather have a large bouquet of home grown flowers to brighten up my home than spend the time tending iffy vegetables.

 

Good: Grow-house Tomatoes, Runner Beans.
Average: Potatoes. Outside Tomatoes, Sunflower.
Rubbish: French Beans, Cucumber.

In posting the above I will still grow the above next season, some perhaps in different positions in the garden.

 

Chia (Salvia hispanica) is the success story of this summer. I doubt it will flower but as a foliage plant it's great.

From this (stolen from The Teenager who uses the seeds to turn perfectly edible dishes into frog spawn, apparently it's trendy)...


...to this in 5 months. The fence is 6 foot tall.



The failed experiment must be Cucamelons, the plants are growing well but the fruit are still just as big as in June. Won't be sustaining the family with these

 

Sweetcorn, courgettes, fennel poor
Carrots, broadbeans, gooseberries and raspberries good.
Runnerbeans so so

 

My main success this year has been the living willow hut. From a start as 2ft wands, the willows with better roots which I put in the corners are now as tall as me, and even the smaller ones which started with basically no roots at all are doing OK. I'll prune in winter to keep them on track, and this time next year it seems likely I'll be starting to shape the structure. It's a bit of a change from the nettle patch it started out as!

And I've got flower buds on the witch hazel for the first time ever. It's been in for 4 years and it keeps looking like it's going to die in summer, but apparently it's just faking.

On the downside, my raised bed project is taking forever. Still, I'm further along than I was.

Oh, and I've done lavender sponge cake for the first time in a few years, using my lavender buds. Yum!