Our successes and failures in 2022

AG's gardeners come clean about what worked and what didn't during this tricky year

- Ruth Hayes

Squash hopes quashed but lots of joy elsewhere

WELL that was quite the year wasn't it! A scorching summer when many crops and plants failed was followed by a mellow Indian summer and ridiculously mild autumn that led to our canna lilies flowering into late November and spring knapweeds having a third flourish at the same time.

In March I sowed 'Gardener's Delight' tomatoes as part of our free seeds schedule and in a previously unheard-of development in my world, every seed germinated.

As a result we've had a bountiful crop of small and medium-sized tomatoes from the garden and greenhouse, so many in fact that a freezer drawer is full of tomato halves and home made tomato sauce, and I made a good haul of chutney too.

Our 'Cox's Orange Pippin' and Jonagold' apples produced bumper crops, as did the fig tree and raspberry canes. The autumn-sown leeks are looking good too.

Our butternut squash and courgettes never really got going. We also had a disastrous brassica season because small white butterflies romped through the double layer of netting supplied with our Agriframe brassica cage and merrily laid their eggs everywhere. Lesson learned, next year I'll get a thinner mesh.

In the flower garden the roses, rudbeckias, fuchsias, gazanias, gaillardias and delphiniums did us proud, but the sweet peas and summer bedding initially gave a very poor performance, though the zinnias and antirrhinums pulled their socks up when the slightly cooler days of autumn arrived.

A garden of 'Eden' but poor potatoes

EVERY gardening year is a mix of triumph and failure, but if I was to pick out a moment, it would be getting my first crop of 16 gorgeous apples from a tree I planted three years ago - against the advice of the late Peter Seabrook.