2022 - Plans and hopes.

Grow fewer bush cherry tomatoes, 6 plants produced so much fruit we couldn't keep up. Grew 3 this year, 4 would probably be enough.

Only grow greenhouse tomatoes to one stem, overcrowding is a recipe for mould. Still got mould but later in the season, on fewer plants and the yield wasn't affected. 

Grow some blight resistant plum tomatoes outdoors as meals taste so much better with homegrown tomatoes instead of tinned. Tremendous success, Nagina/Crimson Plum F1 yielded just under 30kg from 9 plants in a 4 x 4 ft raised bed. No blight until late in October, but it wasn't a bad year for blight anyway.

Six compact chilli plants on a sunny windowsill provide more than enough fruit for a year. The only chillies in the greenhouse will be jalapenos, everything else will be sweet peppers. Flower drop is a problem indoors due to lack of airflow and humidity. Still a decent crop though and more than enough for a year.

Grow more garlic as we go through it so quickly. The Iberian Wight was badly hit by rust so a lot of the bulbs were small, but together with the Solent Wight we should have enough to last until Spring.

Grow less kale and collards, more calabrese and kohlrabi. Now growing the kale/collards much closer together for baby leaves which frees up space for other brassicas. Picking leaves regularly doesn't allow pest like whitefly and mealy cabbage aphid to build up big numbers.

Parsley and coriander in the ground, they go to seed too quickly in pots. Parsley grows much better in the ground, the root system is so dense I find it hard to keep watered in pots. Coriander goes to seed quite quickly anyway, especially in a summer like this, so frequent sowings are necessary. Coriander flowers attract lots of insects like hoverflies and a small type of bee.

Plant tomatoes on the other side of the greenhouse so they don't cast so much shade. This worked quite well, but the concrete base which the greenhouse sits on was protruding much too far in to the border in some places. I managed to chip away some by hand but an SDS drill with a chisel attachment took care of it in a few hours. The next issue is the roots of the big silver birch in next door's garden are coming in to the greenhouse under the concrete and in the middle of summer the tree sucks up all the moisture in the greenhouse soil leaving it like dust. 

Interplanting sweetcorn with squash works but the semi-bush squash got too tall and stopped the 2nd cobs on the sweetcorn from being pollinated. This year I probably planted the sweetcorn too close together and the cherry tomatoes in each corner of the bed swamped the bush squash.

Winter squash in containers, even 50 L ones, doesn't work very well. This year I grew maincrop containers in these big pots and it worked pretty well with each pot producing almost 5kg.