Autumn is well underway, so it’s time to take stock of the summer season’s garden successes and failures.

The biggest success this past season was in the soil. All winter last year, I incorporated fresh cow manure and composted horse manure into the garden beds. Every single bed got one or the other, in addition to my own compost in the spring. And finally my efforts to improve the soil over the past four years have begun to show. There’s still a long way to go, and a lot more compost and manure to haul, but this summer most of my crops grew well, and nutrient deficiencies weren’t obvious until late in the season. A huge improvement over previous years.

Particularly nice crops this year included:

• Strawberry popcorn—This was my first year to plant this corn. I admit I was dubious when I opened the rather expensive packet of seed to find only 15 seeds. It was clear the corn was marketed as a fun thing for kids to grow. However, every seed germinated, and the plants grew to well over 2 metres tall, dwarfing all the other varieties of corn I grew. Each plant yielded two large ears (much larger than the photo on the packet indicated they would be—very un-strawberry-like), and a few even had a third, smaller ear. I was thoroughly impressed by how much popcorn so few plants produced. Of course, the proof of the variety’s worth will be when we pop it. The Glass Gem corn I love so much is marketed as a pop corn, but we’ve found the popping to be poor. It will be a few months before we know if the Strawberry popcorn was worth it.
• Dwarf bean Xera Select—I had decided not to plant dwarf green beans anymore, because the runners produced more, better beans over a longer season. But I still had seeds for a few varieties, so I planted them, thinking I simply wouldn’t buy more. But Xera Select grew beautifully—long, uniform pods, and lots of them. I might just have to plant them again next year.
• Bicolour sweetcorn—This year we managed to have side-by-side comparisons of the flavour of two varieties of sweetcorn, and we found Bicolour to be much sweeter than Florida Supersweet. The plants didn’t seem quite so resistant to drought, though, so I might plant both varieties again next year. They were both good and produced good crops despite water and nutrient stress.
• Cherry tomato Rosella—Oh. My. God. This is possibly my new favourite tomato. This black cherry tomato has so much flavour in each little fruit, it’s addictive. Definitely one to plant again!
• Cherry tomato Cherry Berry—I normally stick with heirloom tomatoes, but this F1 hybrid was amazing this year—excellent flavour, and SO MANY FRUITS! Outstanding value for the space.
• Tomato Black Brandywine—Brandywine flavour in a dusky tomato. These ripened earlier than the Brandywine Pink, which was a bonus.
• Tomato Black Oxheart—Big, fleshy, heart-shaped fruits. These were a winner in my book for sauces and drying.
• Melon Topaz—Honeydew in texture, with flesh the colour of a cantelope, and a flavour somewhere in between the two. These were delicious. Definitely one to plant again.

Crops that were a bit meh:

• Tomato Costoluto Fiorentino—These tomatoes are interesting, but the fruits were smallish, and so ridgy they were a pain to deal with in the kitchen. The flavour was pretty average. At some point, I simply stopped picking them.
• Pea Shiraz—I was excited to plant a purple snow pea this year, but the variety disappointed. A poor yield of unattractive pods that matured quickly and weren’t terribly tasty. Back to the standard snow pea for me next year.

Absolute disasters:

• All the carrots—This year’s carrot disaster had nothing to do with the varieties I planted, and everything to do with the slugs that ate nearly all seeds, and then the birds that uprooted the few plants that managed to evade the slugs. I planted carrots three times, and ended up harvesting about 6 carrots.
• All the potatoes—As with the carrots, the near complete failure of the potatoes had nothing to do with the plants and everything to do with pests. The rats, who had a field day in the garden all summer, tunnelled down the row of potatoes and ate every tuber. I managed to snatch a few out of their greedy jaws, but only a few.

If not for the pests, it would have been a spectacular year in the garden. Even so, nearly every preserving jar is full, the freezer is at capacity, and I’m still bringing in the pumpkins and dry beans, so I can’t really complain.