I realised that we had a bit of a gap in the blog over the summer, must have been too busy gardening! But thought it would be good to write down what grew well and what didn't! 2023 was definitely a year of extremes, with droughts and floods in equal measure.

The biggest take away for 2023 were slugs & snails, with a cool & damp July they got the better of us on quite a few crops, hardest hit were the beetroot & carrots that succumbed to their voracious appetites. Early potatoes were ok but with the drought of June they struggled in the heat, followed by the rain of July (approx 200% of average) just as you want the crops to take advantage of the long summer days! And just as you think its all over we get a heatwave in September, we live in strange times.

But despite all that, some things did do well, the grapes were really helped by the September heatwave,

 Whilst beans and sweetcorn did well in the early warmth of June.

The onions grew well, but we found that the onions grown from seed actually did better than the onion sets, so next year we're going to try growing completely from seed.

Summer fruits did well, with good crops of raspberries and strawberries, our plumb (Victoria) has struggled with breaking branches under the weight of fruit, so we've had to hard prune it to get shape and strength back into the tree.

We grew (for us) the tallest freestanding sunflowers topping out at well over 7feet with no support! We also learned that wasps love to eat sunflowers, not the flower, but they like to nibble the base for the cellulose for their nests, so much so that they ate through 50% of the plants! 

Root crops were a bit of a disaster, set back two fold by probably overly ambitious early planting and then the invertebrate onslaught latter on... we're going to get you!