Autumn's coming.

Judging by the leaves on my blueberries, so I thought I'd have a round up of success and failure in the garden this summer.

The blueberries gave a reasonable crop. They are only small bushes, and we had a handful, or three, off of them. Enough to top a yoghurt when wanted. Because they are only growing in small pots, I'm guessing that's why I'm getting smallish crops. I did buy them as 30cm sticks a couple of years ago, so I suppose they've done well to get this big, given how they don't like lime, and we're not on acid soil. They do need a bit of attention. I give them a mulch of grass cuttings every now and then (I read it somewhere that that helps with acidity in the soil), and I have two plastic bottles on the go, with tap water in that has sat around at least for a couple of days for the chemicals that blueberries don't like to evaporate, and I always water them with this water. Seems to work.

Another success is the raspberries that I'm now getting the 'proper' crop from. These are only growing in smallish pots too, and they've been in there for about 3 years now, but I'm getting quite a nice 2nd crop, after the forced early one I got from leaving a few of last years stems to flower early, rather than cut them down in winter for an autumn crop. The berries are a lot bigger on the autumn crop than they were on the early crop, but its nice to get two crops and spread the season.

Failure. My sweetcorn. I say failure, but I'm not really sure what's going on. I read on some of the gardening forums that a lot of people are suffering the same as me. Short stems, small cobs, and not many cobs forming. My earliest cob never actually produced tassels properly, and it's when the tassels turn brown that you know that the cob is ready, so I'm a bit in the dark as to when to look at it. I did peel the outside away a little bit to see what was going on and a load of earwigs fell out. (I knew that was going to happen with the amount in the garden this year.) There were sweetcorn kernals in there, but they were very pale in colour. I think I'll leave it and check again in a few weeks. The other cobs on the other plants are a lot smaller and very green looking, so I'm not hopeful there either. A combination of things has probably caused it, the not-so-hot summer this year, the shading the young plants got from my very fast growing courgette plant (that was supposed to grow inbetween the sweetcorn, not up and over them), and possibly the drought at the start of the season. Not a good sweetcorn year, all  in all.

Another failure was the second sowings of everything. Carrots, peas, broad beans. As I cleared the veg patch of finished crops, I was sowing direct to replace them. But since the weather has gone back to normal, and it's been raining, the slugs and snails have just mown off any small plants that have emerged. The ones I grew in pots at the start of the season for my first crops, that I planted out as reasonable size plants, were much better at resisting attack. So next year I'll do that for my second sowings too, grow them in pots first so I can keep them out of the way of slugs and snails.

Yet another failure in the veg bed, my French Beans. They started off really well, grew up as lovely green plants, produced the first round of beans absolutely fine, then yellowed and died. No idea what went wrong there. Hopefully just a dud year for me. I grew them last year and had a good crop off of them, so I know they can do well in my veg bed. To make up for it, my trial yellow Golden Sweet Mangetout were a massive success. I got loads of pods off of the 8 plants. Oh, and my Crimson Flowered Broad Beans turned out really well too.

Success. My tomatoes in hanging baskets. Just enough tomatoes for what we needed. Not too many that we're sick of eating them. I do think they need a bigger basket than the 10inch ones I have on one side of the fence. And generally I need to feed them more when they are growing because the plants are a bit sparse of lushness. But the tomatoes are still forming and growing. So all good.

Look what I spotted underneath my large tomato basket. How exotic? Actually, turns out it's a really common moth called an Angle Shades Moth. The larvae feed on herbaceous plants. Great. But it's a pretty moth.

Failure. I've done nothing to the Moroccan Courtyard. I really need to feed the Fatsia in a pot too. It's looking very yellow at the bottom, but the top leaves are nice and green. I'm still collecting ideas for what to do with this area. And I'm using it as a nursery for my plants from seed, so it's not a neglected area, as such.

Success and failure. The success is my new lower lawn from seed. It's still looking very green and lush, and it's knitting together well. I also added a brick edge to it to try and seperate the grass from the bee and butterfly border. Which, is my failure. I've STILL not got round to putting the plants I've got sitting around in pots for this border in. I might make a big effort to do that tomorrow as it sounds like we are going to have a mini-Indian Summer. I'll probably end up getting disctracted and doing something else, like every other time I've meant to do that border.

The bees aren't missing out though because the plants are still flowering in their pots, like this geum.

Another bee plant that is still flowering away down in Compost Corner, and is another success, is my Verbena Bonariensis. It only cost me £2, and it's grown into this enormous plant with absolutely loads of really bright purple flowers. It's one of those plants that's been used all over the show, in every garden makeover on telly for years now. It seemed a bit cliche to buy it, but it was one of the best butterfly plants so I thought I'd get it anyway. Now I've got it, I love it. I love it when I just plant something and all on it's own it grows into a plant that looks as good as the ones on the TV.

The final success in this blog is in the Woodland Area. I picked up these lantern type bird feeders in a garden centre, in a sale. They are meant for pagodas, but they work fine on my hangers. (If you are wondering what the wonky brown thing is that one of the lanterns is hanging off, it's a washing line post that's made out of metal and has been buried in the ground by the previous owner of the house, concreted into a large pot. Since then the old elder tree's roots have worked their way all the way around the pot and it's absoloutely impossible to remove the post without heavy machinary, so I'm using it as a bird feeder hanger, and a tree stake for the apple tree in a pot.)

I think the lantern feeders were £6 the pair. I really needed a proper seed feeder with a proper perch. The ceramic one I had, none of the birds could perch to feed from it, they kept slipping off the shiney glaze. So I got this pair because the peanut feeder I had was an old plastic one that cost a couple of quid and I didn't mind replacing it to have a matching pair.

Anyway, I've finally done it. I've managed to attract Goldfinches into the garden. There are quite a lot around this area. I could hear them singing all over the place. They used to fly over the garden all the time, but they never came in. Now, with my new feeder in place, they do. Excuse the picture, it was taken through a window in the house, so I've had to zoom right in on the birds, and it's lost a bit of clarity. But there they are. Goldfinches. Brilliant. My best success this summer.