F for Failures.

Now that December is upon us I figured it was time to take stock. This year has been a challenging year to say the least and I was fully expecting a very poor general harvest but when actually sitting down to think things through I concluded that all things considered things haven’t turned out too badly.

I’ve decided to split my evaluation of our plots performance and to get the worst out of the way I’ve decided to focus first on the failures by which I mean things that haven’t produced any harvest at all. Surprisingly there were fewer than you might imagine. There were the things that gave early promise such as the pear and cherry trees. These were loaded with blossom in April and fruit set - but we were then disappointed as all the fruitlets aborted any attempts to grow and fell from the trees leaving us with not a single fruit, Even the conference pear in the garden which is a reliable cropper let us down.

The kiwi - Issai - which we grow in a pot in the garden was another plant that produced plenty of flower and set fruit but failed to deliver. This happened last year, not only do the fruitlets fall but the leaves shrivel and die too. Later the plant recovers and looks healthy. I think I have diagnosed the problem as red spider mite damage and so next year I'll be taking precautions.

As for the larger kiwis planted on the plot - there weren't even any sign of flowers on them this year. The female usually flowers but unfortunately the male is a late developer. As for the female she was doing well in April and then was hit by frost in May to recover later in June. Just the right timing to prevent any chance of flowers. Maybe this year was the year that the male intended to get his act together too!

We have attempted to grow celeriac and celery several times with no success and so this year we decided to follow all the rules. The seeds were planted and germinated successfully. They produced fairly good plants which seemed to grow reasonably well - no worry about lack of water. The problem was that neither produced anything edible. The celery produced short tough stems (it was a self blanching variety) and the celeriac had hardly anything below soil level.

None of the onions did particularly well but the red onions - Hyred - were a totally failure and most just disappeared to nothing.

Aubergines are another crop that has eluded us and this year was no exception, I seem to remember the odd flower late in the season but that was it.  Peppers are also being classed as a failure - we did manage a couple of small pathetic specimens but I don’t consider that enough to spare them being classified as a failure. By the time the fruits had turned red they were wizened unappetising specimens.

Finally there were the non-starters. We have grown Crown Prince squash successfully for a few years now but not this year. Not a single Crown Prince nor Autumn Crown seed managed to germinated at all. It was the same story with some alpine strawberry seeds. We had intended raising some new plants to replace some plants that were looking tatty and weary. So was the germination problem down to poor compost, poor seed or poor weather to blame? - I guess we will never know. All we can do is try again next year.

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author by S Garrett