Plans for next year 2024/25

It’s all blurring together. I don’t know what I did when. The cottage garden bed numbers are building. There is an end in sight. As I now know how many more bed I have to do . Which is 6. 2 of them are dug out. No sign of any veg garden drainage, other beds or polytunnels in the near future.

Believe it or not, I've not done too bad. Yes, I'm encucumbered, but I quite like that. Perhaps 4 instead of 5 next year might be better but FOMO sets in at sowing time. I did restrict my toms to 4 per border which is a great improvement. Less like the Amazon jungle at this time of year. I restricted myself to 6 courgettes (plus trombas, which arent doing too well) rather than 10/11, 6 are proving quite ample. I've not grown as many CFB, just one row of about 15ft. The other side of the canes was dedicated to MT. Usually I have had 2x15ft double rows of canes. My 3 x 15ft rows of DFB have been spaced out rather than cramming them in, which is making them easier to pick. I sprayed the courgettes and cucumbers with milk/bicarb mixture which so far has kept mildew at bay. I've reduced the number of sweetcorn. I have a problem with leaf miner on the chard, a bit of research is needed there. Broad beans were a disaster. The hot weather has been a pain. I'm watering certain things sometimes everyday in the 29°C + heat. I've got a meter on the outside tap, so I can calculate the cost, we're over £28 atm, so that would go against any income on my produce, but I think we get a £20 discount for water not going into the drains.

My forward plans atm are to think about more perennial flowers. I rely on bedding for most of my colour, not only does it look too much 'parks & gardens', it's bladdy time consuming. I want to figure out how to prevent the aphids ruining my raspberries and currants, plus transplant wayward rasperry canes into gaps. Preventing leaf miner is another job too.

The only solution for beet leaf miner is mesh, unfortunately. They lay a lot of eggs (they look similar to hoverfly eggs, but they're a brighter white and often lays in multiples), so it's a lot of work looking for them, and they are hard to rub off. I grow all of my beetroot under Enviromesh, and I've grown chard quite successfully under scaffold netting. My second sowing of beetroot is in modules, not under mesh, and they've been hit by leaf miner. I've taken off all of the affected bits and squished the remaining eggs, and I'll give them a final check before planting.

The celery leaf miner is easier to control, I just nip off all of the affected portions of the leaf so the larvae never make it to adult stage, which seems to keep the population down for the rest of the year.

Looking back at my post, the red cabbage went in a raised bed instead of pots, due to lack of compost. We have only just been harvesting them in the past 2 weeks, so they do take up a bed for quite a lot of time even when overwintered. The overwintered cauliflower and calabrese went in a raised bed too, but luckily we had such a warm May they both were out by early June.

I haven't grown any summer squash, courgettes as planned, and I've given up on winter squash too. No peas or climbing French beans either.

Sweetcorn is only taking up 1 square metre of a raised bed.

The greenhouse tomatoes are in QuadGrows, the cucumbers in a wicking tub, and the chillies in Kratky hydroponic buckets. They're all doing really well, and strangely, so are the sweet peppers in the soil on the other side of the greenhouse, so I still have no idea what is wrong with the soil on the tomato side. The only issue with tomatoes is blossom drop from when we had those few days of hot weather in June, probably because the temperature in the greenhouse got too high, and the humidity too low. Now we've got another mini heatwave I'm trying to shade the greenhouse with some scaffold netting and a car windscreen reflector thing, and hoping to keep the humidity up by watering the pavers and misting the plants.

To add to my list. I’ll not be growing sweetcorn outside again. It just doesn’t work here. I will grow it again when I have my tunnels up.

I had an attack of beet leaf miner 2 years ago so last year I covered most of my beetroot with mesh but left a few outside. I expected them to be attacked and to dispose of them before they could they turn into flies. However, the ones not covered were doing a lot better than the covered ones so I uncovered them and they seemed OK. And this year they seem untroubled as well so hopefully have died out here.

My garden is about 200 metres away from an allotment, then there's another one about 400 metres away, so I think we get every pest imaginable.