Garden: Review of the Year

Rubbish!

Well, that was easy ...

Maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but 2013 has been far and and away the most difficult growing season we've had.  It started to rain and snow in January and pretty much kept going through until the middle of June, bringing devastating floods to the Pyrenees.  So although we did have an epic ski season, we missed days because there was just so much snow that the roads or resort had to be closed due to the risk of avalanches.

But an epic gardening year, it was not.

Leeks under the snow in February 2013

The sun failed to shine, the soil failed to warm up, and I failed to get anything into the ground.  By mid May we were probably 6-8 weeks behind the standard set by the previous years.  As an aside, if we'd been still living off grid and relying on the sun to recharge our batteries we would have long since been sitting in the dark.

The tomatoes were planted out in early May, a couple of weeks later than usual (no greenhouses here) simply because they were getting far too big indoors.  Sown into jiffy blocks, I was expecting to plant them straight out, but in the end they all had to be potted on indoors and somehow we had to find floor space for them in the salon-sejour. Harvesting began just about a month late.  The sudden change from cold and wet June, with night time temperatures still dropping close to freezing, to a blistering hot July where the temperature soared up into the forties did nothing to help the plants.  They grew fast and sappy and then frazzled!

The short period in early July when the rain stopped, the temperature soared and growth went mad.

It didn't help that I had decided to sow fewer tomato seeds and rely on potting on and planting up the side shoots - armpits according to those wonderful folk at the The Grapevine -  to get the required number of plants.  Alas, the side shoots struggled to root in the cold and then struggled to survive in the heat.  Some of them didn't begin to produce flowers until well into September.  So the tomato harvest was well down.  Last year I didn't have to buy tomatoes at all, with bottled and frozen fruit seeing us right through.  This year I doubt we'll have enough to last much beyond February.

The slugs loved the weather, needless to say. I lost track of the number of times I lost entire plantings to the little bastards.  Certainly all the spring cabbages, and their re-sown replacements.  Ditto the mizuna, mustard greens, pak choi and purple and white sprouting broccoli.  This is our essential food for the hungry gap, which next year is quite clearly going to be a starvation gap.  Or shopping gap.  Slugs had most of the parsnips and even the leeks.  These latter were again almost a month late going into the ground as their home for the winter was just a clayey bog.  Now I know they don't mind the wet, but it was impossible to actually make dibber holes for the plants in the clay. And then of course it baked solid in July, but somehow we managed.  Although the leeks are woefully tiny this year and again are not going to keep us going right through until the late spring.

Pak choi after a day with the flea beetles and a night with the slugs. 

Oh, and the seed merchant packed kohlrabi seeds in the summer cabbage packets.  I like kohlrabi, but I did want some summer cabbages.  By the time I realised what was growing, it was not only too late to sow some more cabbage seeds but I had also just bought some kohlrabi seeds to trial in 2014.  Hey ho.

Even the courgettes failed to glut this year.  Yes, really.  The freezer is not full of grated courgette waiting to be turned into cake right through the winter, or slow cooked courgette and tomato pasta sauce.  I have a couple of jars only of pickled gherkins and we failed to eat cucumber everyday from May until October, as in previous years. Cucumber mosaic virus saw to that.  The winter squashes, too were a month or so late going out into the ground as most of the first lot got eaten by the slugs.  The eight plants each produced a single fruit, so they won't keep us going through the winter either.

Charentais melon.  We went away for a week in early October leaving them on the vine as they were still unripe.  This is what we came back to.  Slugs.

Ok, so it wasn't all bad.  We were still eating 2012 planted winter lettuces well into July as they showed no interest in bolting until the temperature hit the forties.  We don't have any for next year.  Slugs.  The haricot beans for eating fresh did very well after, you guessed it, a slow start.  Successional sowing was quite unnecessary as the plants just kept producing and producing.  So we do have a lot of yellow, purple and green haricot in the freezer plus a few jars of sweet pickled beans.  The beans for drying did less well, the stressful growing conditions meaning that the plants that survived the onslaught of the slimy ones only produced a meagre harvest before giving up the ghost.

Strawberries were good, too.  And would have been better without the attack of slugs.  The raspberries have either succumbed to fire blight, or simply died from their feet being water-logged for the first six months of the year.  We'll know more next year when we see if any new shoots are produced.  Oh, and globe artichokes were amazing in the spring, as I've already blogged.  We had so many we just ate them as a side vegetable, picked young and sauteed, which still seems entirely decadent!

The flea beetles were perhaps slightly less destructive than in previous years as they don't like wet weather.  But boy did they have a little flourish in July.  And caterpillars were a problem for the first time this year.  Yes, we usually get a few in the autumn which are easily picked off, but this time any brassicas that grew big enough to  fight off the slugs and flea beetles were smothered.

The stored garlic appears to have leek moth or something similar.  Certainly some of the heads have been eaten away completely, I've found a few maggots in my garlic pot in the kitchen, and we seem to have a lot of little moths in the house ...  It was a good crop, too.  Although harvested a month late.

And then in late August everything fell apart somewhat as I succumbed to ill health and failed to do very much in the garden at all.  The pink fir apple potatoes were harvested very late and as a consequence the skins are unpleasantly thick.  They take an age to peel and given that standing up is literally a pain, they are a nuisance!

So all in all, 2013 has not been the best of years in the garden.  But the seed catalogues have started to arrive and I'm dreaming of a warm spring, hot summer with rain at night and a long warm autumn.  Well, we can dream.