How did the garden go this summer?
Summer has delivered long days of hot sunshine, warm seas to swim in and beautiful evenings and sunsets. Phew. The country needed it after last summer’s no-show and ensuing weather devastation. It’s interesting how a wet winter, moderate spring, and hot, dry summer affect not just humans, but plant life. I’ve had a huge success with scarlet runner beans, and the plants are only just reaching their peak, minimal success with regular green beans, phenomenal success with baby eggplants but miserable output from two zucchini plants. Zucchini plants are usually the easiest things to grow. Who knows why they flunked in my garden, though I often forgot to water them because they were grown away from the main garden beds. I paid the price. Tomatoes got away on me. I netted the plants but the birds pecked around the outside and those atrocious green stinkbug thingies set up home in the plants and chomped through a few kilos of them over the season. I ripped most of them out yesterday, though I still have several more plants doing well in other parts of the garden. My conclusion? The scarlet runners were grown from seeds I had saved from the year before. That makes for strong plants. They seem to love the compost dug into the soil. I let too many tomato plants pop up organically and created a jungle. No one to blame but me. Makrut lime leaves, one tree in the ground, another in a large pot, have thrived. Tarragon growing around the scarlet runners has been prolific, as has been basil. Potatoes in a sack was a great idea.
As usual with gardening, there is plenty to mull over, and successes are always worth celebrating, and the failures are quickly forgotten. There’s been plenty of joy from flowering yellow, pink and red hibiscus plants, and a bunch of wildflowers, scatter-sown, have popped up and are bringing the bees. While it is an ongoing battle here to beat or outfox, the pheasant (I’m sure there are more than one, but they all look the same!), I’ve generally enjoyed the wildlife that makes a home in the garden and surrounding bush.
