Tales from the GardenAfrica Dome
By and large, we’ve had a good summer, with only a few disappointments. Our tomatoes survived the distance, without any sign of blight – producing long trusses simply dripping with a variety of little gems. Apart from eating aplenty in salads and sauces, we’ve been reducing and storing as concentrate (for the long winter ahead) and making all kinds of chutneys.
Likewise, our potatoes and greens have been superb. Netting our brassicas against pigeons certainly paid dividends – ensuring wonderful purple sprouting broccoli amongst other wonders. We are looking forward to enjoying our Brussel sprouts (not often one looks forward to the first frost!). Our cucumbers were a little disappointing, but still put on a fairly descent show. We also tried patty-pan squashes this year, which were a complete revelation – and still going well. They’re soft little fruits are simply delicious when steamed lightly and coated in butter.
The most baffling of all was the total failure of our sweetcorn. Despite being under rotation, and what we considered to be good soil, we still needed to replant three separate batches. But still they refused to produce anything other than small deprived looking leaves and shrivelled wee cobs. Unlike our pumpkins, the butternuts didn’t put on any bulk, again refusing to produce for us.
Outside the dome we left our grass to grow long and wispy, attracting a host of pollinators and providing shelter for the frogs we nurtured in our water catchment area. The bad news was that we subsequently had more caterpillars than ever. The good news was that, as well as producing wonderful yellow flowers, the Ragwart provided excellent feeding for the now rare cinnabar moth – stripping it to the stem instead of our brassicas. Think we’ve hit on something there.
As always, we’d welcome any advice on how to avoid any of the above problems in future, or indeed any thoughts on varieties we can try throughout the winter, or propagate for next year. Contact us here.
