Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: madcat on September 06, 2018, 17:03
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Enough with the gloom! What have been the surprise stars of your growing season?
I'll start the ball rolling with mine. Dwarf french beans Kinghorn Wax - picked up on a whim in France, thinking they were climbers. Read the packet more carefully and thought "oh well, give 'em a go". Little plants, but real troopers. kg per plant has beaten the climbers hollow, and with a longer season.
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Little Snowpea - Purple that I bought from Jungle Seeds. They are dwarf and produced loads of pods. The pods are small, but were so prolific it didn't matter and they kept going for ages.
I had a few in a pot as an early greenhouse crop. They got slung outside in the end, but kept going. The plants were tragic looking, but still flowering and cropping. I have planted more for an autumn greenhouse crop and saved seeds :)
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Whatever pepper is growing where the Jalapenos should be in the top GH, I think they're saved seeds from an aldi sweet pepper. There are lots of them and they're huge :ohmy: just wish they'd colour up.
Honorable mention to the Shirley tomatoes, which have been the size of beefsteaks with trusses containing as many as the Sungolds in the bottom GH (they've done pants in the top GH :wacko: ).
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For the second year running, Sutton's Crimson Crush blight resistant tomato. Big crop and the best fried tomato ever!
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Dwarf Beans for me as well. Broad Beans sadly in the neighbours composter. Rocket has done well. Hanging Tomatoes, still hanging in there. Grapes Brilliant. Mrs Bouquet
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Sweet Pepper 'Orange'; 3 small bushy plants turning about 2-3 large, boxy fruits each a week. They're still flowering now and have the best I've ever grown.
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A round of appause also to Swiss Chard Bright Lights, seed to harvest in less than 6 weeks, look fab and have really impressed.
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Yellow Delight tomatoes. Almost as sweet as the Sungolds, early to crop and ripen and still going strong now.
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Peppers (sweet and chillies) and Melons grown out doors.
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Most crops have done about as well as in a 'normal' summer, although the outdoor and GH toms have been more prolific and earlier than usual, and the GH cukes didn't like the heat at all but have still done reasonably well overall.
Biggest stars, if not the most numerous, are the Crown Prince winter squashes (pic.) :ohmy:
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Onions, Charlotte and Elfe pots, and broccoli.
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:D Carrots of all kinds, best crop ever
:D Apero cherry tomatoes, still fruiting away and such a wonderful flavour, even better than Sungold
:D Melon Outdoor Wonder, albeit in the polytunnel, with fruits nearly six inches across and so juicy
:D Courgette Parthenon, which has been fruiting since the end of April in the polytunnel, really tasty too
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Shirley toms - fabulous!
'Cherokee trail of tears' black beans - marvellous!
Sweetcorn - giving' em away!
Keep positive eh?
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'Cherokee trail of tears' black beans - marvellous!
I've been pondering them for next year .... you might have persuaded me!
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'Cherokee trail of tears' black beans - marvellous!
I've been pondering them for next year .... you might have persuaded me!
I can highly recommend them too... didn't grow any this year as we had so many still from the previous year :D
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I had three Butternut squashes, that I planted out and they barely grew throughout the hot spell despite watering. I'd given up on them, but then they suddenly went mad and now I have loads of massive squashes🙂.
Perpetual strawbs from Lidl that I planted two to a pot in April and gave a great first flush of big fruit and are now giving a second big crop of smaller fruit which is a lovely late season bonus. Looks like feeding them works!
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'Cherokee trail of tears' black beans - marvellous!
I've been pondering them for next year .... you might have persuaded me!
PM me if you want any seeds, Madcat!
A chum here gave me some and now half the village knows about them! They're fabulous!
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Xenia gooseberry; wow delicious!
I lost the battle with sawfly last year so didn’t get much of a crop. This year no sawfly and lots of gorgeous gooseberries that went into all our salads in place of grapes.
Not sure if the lack of sawfly was related to the weather or the fact that I under planted the gooseberries with garlic to disguise their smell.
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'Cherokee trail of tears' black beans - marvellous!
I've been pondering them for next year .... you might have persuaded me!
May I be cheeky & ask if you have enough to send me a few please😊 just looked them up & they sound very interesting.
PM me if you want any seeds, Madcat!
A chum here gave me some and now half the village knows about them! They're fabulous!
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Mulatka beetroot has been excellent. All the brassicas have been fantastic, especially Kelper Gigantic swede, which lived up to its name and wasn't woody. Had some fantastic beans, I especially liked Kentucky Wonder Wax, a climbing yellow french bean that I got from a seed circle. Will definitely be saving seed from it. It was very productive and tasty and not stringy even when large.
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I tried Outdoor Girl tomato this year. Wow what a crop. They aren't a particularly tasty fruit, but great for chutney. I've already saved about hundred seeds .
Next big success for me would be carrots grown in pots. My little nephew said they tasted like the best carrots in the world .... and I think he was probably right ;) :tongue2: :D
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Xenia gooseberry; wow delicious!
I lost the battle with sawfly last year so didn’t get much of a crop. This year no sawfly and lots of gorgeous gooseberries that went into all our salads in place of grapes.
Not sure if the lack of sawfly was related to the weather or the fact that I under planted the gooseberries with garlic to disguise their smell.
They're a fabulous fruit, Grubbypaws.
Do you know if the cuttings I have made from our singleton will come true?
We just love them, but as we're leaving our allotment, we want to take some with us for future gatherings!
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lovely to hear so many successes!!
amazing squashes JayG!
At home I had a brilliant crop of blackcurrants at the beginning on July - Big Bens - I think the horse manure the previous spring had finally kicked in. Unfortunately I didnt have time to eat many, pick them all or to make jam so I gave them all away.
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At home I had a brilliant crop of blackcurrants at the beginning on July - Big Bens - I think the horse manure the previous spring had finally kicked in. Unfortunately I didnt have time to eat many, pick them all or to make jam so I gave them all away.
We also had a very healthy crop of Big Bens which we put straight in the freezer. Last night my husband served up duck breasts with blackcurrent sauce; blackcurrents cooked from frozen. Wow! I am never going to use my blackcurrents for anything else now :D :D :D
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TBH, everything has been good this year apart from a few things that I thought I would chance 'old seed' from and they have failed miserably. (butternut squash/pumkin/sprouts), even though they germinated the yield is really poor.....I will learn from this mistake :D
my sweetcorn was new seed and although amazing taste and quality, it did have a low yield (only one cob per plant rather than the usual two, Lark). although it did start off slow due to the cold spring.
all in all, its been a good year, albeit a reduced crop for me as i was busy doing otherthings and the slow start to the season.
cant complain.
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Courgette Atena has done extremely well, All Green Bush not so well. Oddly enough it was the other way round last year!
Peas Greenshaft.
Sweet peppers, best year ever, all from saved supermarket seeds.
Cucumbers inside and out done very well.
Most other things have had an average year. Garlic was so so ( Again! ) and Florence Fennel was a no show for the second year running.
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Little Gem squash. I started growing this when one of my bridge partners said she really liked them (she has lived in South Africa where they are very popular), but they can be difficult to get hold of and are expensive. For the first few years, they were very mediocre in cropping, only getting one or two a week throughout the summer. This year, a Mediterranean-like summer arrived in early May and they went rampant. All I had to do was water them occasionally and I have been rewarded with not far off a hundred of them in total this year. My bridge partner has received so many of them she has had to give some to her daughter, even she can't eat 22 of them in one week.