Neats Home Garden
  • Home
    • About Helena Goddard
  • Seasonal Blog
  • Contact/Events

Top Veg for 2014 - and What Not to Grow in 2015

26/11/2014

 
Recently Peter, a friend, asked me what fruit and veg I'd grow next year. Well, here's the current top list - as well as a word of warning on what not to grow in 2015.

Best fruit & veg 2014
1. (Autumn sown) Broad beans - Aquadulce Claudia
Still a classic. Great taste and early cropping. Hard to find sweet tender broad beans in the supermarket, so definitely worth growing. I've just sowed next year's crop to overwinter. 

2. 'Green Globe' Artichokes
Easy to grow from seed, tough, and they all cropped in their first year! Delicious boiled and dipped in butter. 

3. 'Polka' Raspberries
These are large, sweet, and productive, even after a long dry summer, and in their first year. We're going to grow more of these - they are eaten as soon as they're picked. 

4. (Summer sown) Dwarf French beans 
A revelation. Small, tender, delicious. No air miles! No carbon footprint! A delicious crop to sow in mid to late summer for an early autumn harvest.

5. Rocket 
As regular readers know, a long standing favourite of mine. A hot peppery taste, and chemical free Don't get carried away, as I did, and end up with a spring glut; unless you have a family of twenty, instead, sow parsimoniously.

6. 'Migonette' Alpine Strawberries
Tiny, yes, and hence so small you hardly taste them. But they are ever so fun to pick, especially with small children, who are excellent at spotting the ripe berries hiding under low-lying leaves. The berries look lovely decorating puddings. The blossom is also decorative, so the plants make good edging. 

7. Parsley, thyme, basil, chives
Divide chives, pot up, grow on next year. Thyme is tough enough to over-winter. Parsley and basil sow fresh. If you have the space, grow Parsley in the ground rather than in pots (it puts on a deep tap root and romps away). I have blitzed my spare herbs into melted butter, and frozen it, for use on fish and veg.
Worst veg and fruit 2014
1. 'Wizard' Field Beans
This was a variety I purchased from the Real Seed Co. They do warn about it being suspectible to chocolate rust. But boy - I've never seen anything like it. Most of the plants were heavily mottled with rust, and even those that weren't still produced a bitter tough bean. Yuk. Try as we might, we eventually gave up eating these, and binned the lot.

2. 'Crystal Apple' white cucumbers
This was a Thompson & Morgan special. They describe it as follows: "The crisp, tender flesh has a sweet flavour with no bitter after taste." Rubbish. There is hardly any flesh on these - the insides are full of seeds - and the flesh is extremely bitter. Prolific, but absolutely grim eating. Again, in the end, after numerous bitter meals, we gave up on these.

3. 'Rossa Ricciolina da Taglio' Red lettuce and 'Rossa di Treviso' Raddicio
Bitter, bitter, bitter. That's all I can say. And I like bitter lettuces! Again, we tried, but couldn't bring ourselves to eat much of them.

4. Radishes - Red Globe
Unless you are Peter Rabbit or my father-in-law, you will be probably be defeated by these hardy, productive, peppery radishes. Sow thinly! 

5.  Strawberries
I grew several varieties, including Cambridge Favourite, Red Cascade, and Honeyoye. I netted them closely, but whatever I did, the mice and grass snakes still nibbled them. Honestly, I'll give them one more year, but I doubt I'll keep growing them.

Comments are closed.

    Favourite Sites

    Seedaholic
    Good suppliers of flower, veg and unusual plant seeds. 

    Fentongollan
    Cornish bulb supplier. My go-to for daffodils. Helpful staff. 

    Peter Nyssen
    All-round fab website for bulb hunting. Excellent quality tulips.

    Archives

    June 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013

    Categories

    All
    Agretti
    Bees
    Broad Beans
    Bulbs
    Bumbleebee
    Fruit
    Garden Design
    Garden Design
    Gardening
    Gardens To Visit
    Hedging
    Iron-induced Chlorosis
    Lettuce
    Magnolia Grandiflora
    Plants
    Pond
    Pumpkins & Squash
    Recipe
    Rocket
    Rose
    Seasons
    Seeds
    Snowdrops
    Spiders
    Sweetpeas
    Vegetables
    Viburnum
    Weeds
    Wildlife
    Yacon

    RSS Feed

    Tweets by @neatshomegarden

 © Neats Home Garden 2013
About   Seasonal Blog   Recipes   Contact