Vegetable garden – will this year be the last ?

So the summer has been and gone, and what a summer it was too but now the nights are drawing in and the autumn is upon us, We have slightly more time to sit down and write a couple of articles about the vegetable garden  and to bring everybody back up to speed after a fairly long gap.

You may well remember back in May  ( article here )  we finally managed to get the seed potatoes into the ground after a rainy spring that kept everybody inside  and the ground so wet and muddy that work was impossible.

We said back then that we’d planted very late and unfortunately we paid  for our tardiness.

We planted 50 kg of seed potatoes and when it finally came to dig up the new crop -  what actually came to the surface was more or less,  50 kg of potatoes.  Small hard potatoes that had obviously suffered.

Even the digging up was not that easy as the ground had been baked so hard  it was like concrete.  I even managed to break the handle of the spade attempting to break through the potatoes.  In the end we had to wait until there was a rainfall,  finally some rain after two months of drought,  which soften the ground up enough to be able to get to the potatoes below.

This vegetable garden is turning into a real character building exercise as you can see in the images below, it was a thoroughly disappointing season after all that work – just four boxes of potatoes. I wonder just how long they will last. Certainly not right through the winter.