Growing your own vegetables isn't all courgette gluts and baskets of freshly harvested salad leaves. Often we gardeners fail in our attempt to grow our own food, especially when you're first learning. As promised, here are my vegetable failures of 2019. As I am hoping to encourage more people to get into gardening and grow their own food, it seems a bit silly not to share my own flops. We all fail, but we learn and we get better - its all part of the parcel. So without further ado:
Sad peppers:
So I decided to grow my peppers and chillies from seed this year. Sadly they left little to be desired and I got very little fruit, despite my regular fertilising. My young plants were attacked by pests in the early days, and didn't really recover. They were also quite leggy and weak generally. Like tomatoes, if you want to get ripe peppers by the end of the season, you need to sow the seeds early - like in February - in warmth. So I started the seeds on my kitchen windowsill, with some help from a propagator. They germinated easily enough, but then I had the issue of giving them enough light whilst keeping them in warm conditions. My kitchen windowsill was too dark, but my greenhouse was too cold in March - and I had nowhere else to keep them. So I started the season with weak, leggy seedlings. Then once the weather got warmer, the greenfly took over. I constantly sprayed and fed, but in the end I just gave up. Next year, I have decided I am going to let the experts grow my peppers and chillies, and buy them as young plants in the spring. Maybe one day I will grow them from seed again, never say never right?
Black fly Infestation on my broad beans!
This always happens to broad beans. It happened last year, and I have heard it is a fairly common occurance. You can pinch out the top of broad bean plants when they reach a certain height, and this is meant to discourage blackly. I did this, and it didn't work. Eventually a few ladybirds found their way to the infestation and began to feast away, but it was too little too late. You can spray the blackly with washing up liquid diluted in water. I got this advice from my mother-in-law and sadly I didn't take it - I will next year though. And I am going to start my broad beans even earlier, to see if I get an early crop before the blackly appear. To be fair, we still got lots of broad beans. But we could have had more if I had only got the spritz out.
Brassicas - what brassicas?
This was by far my biggest failure this year. I was very proud of the brassicas I grew from seed - purple sprouting broccoli and kalettes (a hybrid between kale and Brussel sprouts). The seedlings were healthy and robust and, once I had planted them in the early summer, appeared to grow to be beautiful looking plants:
I kept an eye on the young plants and saw the odd patch of caterpillar eggs on the underside of the leaves, which I removed:
While I saw the cabbage white butterflies fluttering around my raised beds, I truly believed I was keeping on top of the caterpillar egg removing - no need to place a net over my beautiful plants. How wrong I was. It seemed to happen overnight - One minute I had gorgeous plants, then next minute this was happening:
They were just everywhere, and I reacted the way I'm sure many gardeners would - I indulged in a few caterpillar massacres. I couldn't believe that these guys got past my caterpillar egg check, and I was annoyed with myself for not taking my neighbour's advice to net my raised beds. Next year - there is always next year.
We still got a good crop of purple sprouting broccoli before the plants were annihilated, as I grew an early cultivar. Sadly the katettes didn't fare so well. After yet another discovery of a caterpillar infestation, I threw the gardening equivalent of a toddler tantrum - I pulled the plants out and gave up on them! What a drama queen!
Split Tomatoes
This usually happens to tomatoes when you water infrequently. It seems I was so enamoured with my tumbling cherry tomatoes, and their outstanding performance, I slightly neglected the Gardener's Delight tomatoes growing nearby. Ooops!
Contorted carrots
It might look sweet, and I chuckled as I pulled it up - but it's a pain in the bum to wash and prepare these twisted carrots. I think I know what went wrong here - I think I didn't thin the seedlings finely enough - they were growing too close together. This was pure laziness. Lesson learnt.
To be honest I had more failures than mentioned in this blog - from young basil plants that failed to really grow, to a pathetic crop of blueberries. The purpose of this blog is not to put anyone off growing their own vegetables, but more to demonstrate that mistakes happen, and you learn and get better. So I hope if you have had any failures yourself, you aren't giving yourself a hard time. If you would like to let me know what you failed to grow this year, I would love to hear! DM me on Instagram or leave a message below! If you would like to hear about what I did manage to grow well this year, check out my post on my fruit and vegetable successes of 2019.
Have a great week!
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