Best crops this summer?

Soilman's been asking what people’s best crops have been this year. For us it’s definitely (and I’m touching wood as I type this) been the celeriac, which had 100% germination and is bulbing up beautifully. Probably, now I’ve typed this, there will be some previously unknown celeriac blight or pest that will wipe out our crop!

Our worst crop was definitely the asparagus peas – not that they were difficult to grow or anything like that but they just tasted lousy (sorry Duncan, but we weren’t convinced by your arguments in their favour).

Other things that did well this year for us were strawberries and beans. Our peas were good but not exceptional and we definitely need to grow more next year. Our overwintered broad beans were brilliant, but our spring planted ones were attacked by blackfly and did nothing very much. Our first early potatoes were superb: large, tasty, easy to dig, our salad potatoes were good: small, tasty, not so easy to dig, and our maincrop were disappointing, but that wasn’t their fault – we ran out of properly prepared soil and had to plant them in an area of the plot that hadn’t been properly dug or manured and it showed, when we dug them they were small and scabby.

So what’s been your success and failure rate over the summer?

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-failure, allotment-success