Plans for next year

Six cucumbers and ten courgettes for two people sounds like a nightmare!

This year has been terrible for a lot of things, Veggie, so it's not just you.

Probably not going to bother with climbing beans again. The frame takes a while to build and they're harder to pick due to the height. They also don't last very long, and two years in a row they've finished in August. Bush beans are finer and taste better, I can get multiple successions in and grow them in big containers I have no other use for. This would free up 1 square metre of a raised bed which I can use to grow onions/shallots instead.

I've really gone off mangetout peas, they just don't interest me much anymore, we don't use them much in cooking, and I find them annoying to pick in terms of timing and frequency. It's also another frame I have to build.

I've had two terrible years of tomato growth in the greenhouse border. I don't really know why, and the chillies in that soil have been awful too. Confusingly, the sweet peppers on the other side of the greenhouse, in soil two feet away from the tomatoes, are the best I've ever grown, and the tomatoes were fantastic on that side a few years ago too. My theories are some sort of the disease in the soil, or raspberry/tree roots are stealing the nutrients. Anyhow, I'm not going to put up with another year of terrible yields from the greenhouse, so I am going to make some wicking containers (similar to the QuadGrow style) for the tomatoes and the cucumbers.

I am happy with zero courgettes or summer squash this year, so that will continue. Winter squash continues to be a failure and I'm not sure they're worth it.

Sweetcorn looks like a bit of disaster after that recent storm, but time will tell. I probably don't need a full raised bed of it.

I am going to grow my overwintered cabbages in pots raised up off the ground, because this year's got decimated by slugs and I just chucked them in the compost. Overwintered calabrese and cauliflower can be great, but I can't leave them taking up a whole raised bed after the start of June, and whether they head up or not is very weather dependent, so I will probably grow those in containers too.

We've really enjoyed red cabbage (and kohlrabi/carrot/onion) coleslaw, so I will be growing more early red cabbage.

I'm not growing to grow garlic between the strawberries again. It worked well last year, but the strawberry plants were bigger this year and probably outcompeted the garlic for water and nutrients. I actually planted some spare sunflowers between the strawberries after the garlic was harvested, and they've done really well. I don't have many good places to plant sunflowers, and they get decimated by slugs or snails in the front garden, so I will continue growing them in the strawberry bed.