The Veg Beds: Triumphs, Disasters, and the Odd Tomato Miracle
Lessons from a season of bolting leaves, slugs at the salad bar, and courgettes big enough to row down the Thames - where peas ran amok, onions lay in disgrace, and the sweet taste of small victories
I’ve been standing, staring at my vegetable beds for about an hour, wondering where it all went wrong. That is probably a touch melodramatic. If you are picturing me wailing on my knees, screaming at the sky, I have overcooked the drama. But, as my maths tutor often said:
‘There is definitely room for improvement, young man!’
The Cutting Garden Fails
This is a rough and ready makeshift area. The main thing to know is that it is a total sun trap: baking hot, dry, and dusty.
It is bordered on one side by sorry-looking (partially incinerated) hydrangea mopheads. Why hydrangeas? My partner Jacq likes drying the flowers for wreaths, but they never reach full bloom because it is a furnace.
On the flip side, the lavender hedge has been fantastic. Smothered in blooms and bees for weeks on end, and now clipped into a low undulating silvery boundary. Lovely. The bees were happy, I was happy.
That hydrangea hedge is going. Even if I mulched and irrigated, it is simply too hot and dry for such lush shrubs to bloom happily. More lavender and that stalwart erigeron will thrive here.
The rest of the space is rather hopeless. To fill the gap, I put in a row of spare tomatoes that should have been fat and juicy salad fruits. Instead, they have been bonsai’d in the shallow, dry soil. The leaves are small, the fruits tiny. The surprising upside is that those little toms are exquisitely sweet, ultra-concentrated tomato joy.
This area was supposed to be overflowing with blooms: dense rows of deep purple larkspur, frothy nigella, spires of pink limonium and white mignonette, sweet peas and sweet rocket. On camera it looks charming enough, but the reality was four mignonette, three limonium, and not a single sweet pea that managed to flower. They simply withered on their frames.
The only summer colour comes from self-sown larkspur, which did a much better job of propagation than I did. A couple of volunteer dahlias also popped up from forgotten tubers.
Germination was poor for the first time in years. My mind was on the vegetables. Then came the heat and glaring sunshine. Normally I welcome sunshine, but there was so much of it I could barely keep up with watering.
Those little seedlings faced flood, then famine. They grew weakly and stressed. By the time it came to planting, they were already bolting as dwarfed plants. Hopeless.
Moving swiftly on to the vegetable beds!
Bed One – Bolting and lettuce fatigue
Lettuce, spinach, rocket, beetroot, carrots, and broad beans. The traditional spring crops. They all started off so well and it was a good early spring crop. I obviously sowed too many lettuces and by May I was already sick of the sight of them.
The heat made the rocket bolt quickly, but I do not mind that. The leaves grow more peppery and the flowers are tasty as well. My mistake was not sowing enough, so the crop finished prematurely, leaving me with just the lettuce. Meh.
Under row covers, the plants had some shade from the sun and enjoyed a little more humidity while young. The covers also kept most pests at bay, apart from the inevitable slugs and snails, which were relatively few and far between.
Then the broad beans shot up and I could not keep the covers on. In my frustration I pulled them off completely. Within days, leaf miner moved into the beetroot and flea beetles peppered the rocket and spinach with holes.
I picked two harvests of broad beans, remembered the faff of blanching and de-sheathing, then promptly ignored the rest. They succumbed to black bean aphids and drought, toppled over, and were ripped out. That is the last year for broad beans in this garden.
Despite seemingly endless watering, the root veg refused to develop. Beetroot was passable, but the carrots gave tiny harvests. I cleared the miniature carrots thinking they would make dainty little salads, then promptly forgot them in the garage, where they shrivelled to nothing.
And let’s not forget the reappearance of slugs. Somehow plenty remained despite the desiccated soil. They found their happy place tucked between lettuce leaves. To be honest, I was at peak lettuce fatigue, so I let the slugs have their fun.
Lesson learned: never underestimate how fast spring salads can bolt, how quickly broad beans can turn into a pest hotel, and how resourceful slugs can be when they find a salad bar.
Bed Two – The great purple pea fiasco
At some point I must have had a colossal brain fart. Instead of planting peas in neat rows across the width of the bed, I decided to grow them in a single row down one side.
My apparent misreading of the variety ‘Blauwschokker’ led to possibly the most farcical scene in the garden’s entire existence. In my head, these purple-podding peas would reach a manageable height of around 1.2 metres (four feet).
What I did not expect was the need to hammer in several full-size tree stakes and hang a second net as they rampaged skyward to well over 2.5 metres (eight feet). Eventually, they broke out of their makeshift support altogether and collapsed across the tomatoes.
And for all that chaos, the peas were not even worth it. They were not particularly sweet, they were not memorable, they were just… meh.
Fast forward a few weeks. The last of the bland peas were harvested, the strangler vines ripped out, and the tomatoes left in a state of shock, blasted by June sunshine and 30°C heat.
Lesson learned: peas always grow taller than you think, and jute netting may look rustic but it is complete garbage. It stretches and sags so quickly it could not contain a pensionable hedgehog that had taken to drinking beer traps and really let itself go.
Bed Three – Slightly less embarrassing
Another long row of peas, but this time they behaved themselves, stayed within the pre-agreed height, and produced plump little pods of tasty peas. These were ‘Oskar’ and ‘Pisello Nano’.
The rest of the space was crammed with ten DutchGrown dahlia tubers, sweet peas, calendula, a few rogue borage plants, plus spare courgettes and cucumbers.
It was a little… full.
Once the peas finished, the dahlias surged into action, pumping out beautiful blooms all summer. The sweet peas clambered up the arch and produced more flowers than I could ever cut.
The courgettes tripped me up with their monstrous sprawling spiny leaves, so they were evicted. The cucumber simply vanished without trace. Gone.
The calendula and borage grew enormous, but by July they were spent. I cut them down, only for them to reshoot. The borage bounced back, but the calendula returned small, weak, and riddled with powdery mildew. Worst of all, the flowers had changed from deep rusty oranges to shocking lemon yellows. Ooof!
Lesson learned: overstuff a bed and it turns into a botanical version of a house share… one or two flourish, the rest sulk, and someone always disappears without explanation.
Bed Four – The fiery spring onions
This was the herb, onion, odds and sods bed. The coriander bolted almost immediately thanks to the weather, the chervil never germinated, but the spring onions were a triumph. ‘Lilia’ produced deep red-skinned bulbs that were sweet, mild, and the best I have grown.
That is until I forgot about them. Left too long in the ferocious sun and dry soil, they swelled into super-concentrated, mouth-burning bulbs that could double as tear gas.
Lesson learned: harvest spring onions when they are still spring onions.
Bed Five – Potato, tomato
Bed Five was supposed to have dahlias and potatoes. But a last-minute change meant the dahlias went into buckets for the terrace, while the new DutchGrown tubers went into Bed Three. That left big gaps, which I filled with tomatoes.
Of course, I had also read that you should never, ever, ever, ever plant tomatoes near potatoes for fear of blight leaping across and reducing the entire lot to a soggy, stinking mush. Well, blight never arrived. The summer has been too hot and dry, and I suppose I have been lucky.
I cut the first and second early potatoes down in early July when the leaves yellowed. I simply left the tubers in the soil and returned a month later to find them… well… amazing. Most were double the size I normally get. The yield was staggering: nearly three kilos per plant, two sacks full in the garage. ‘Wilja’ were very white, floury, and made excellent roasties and chips. For me, Charlottes rule!
The runaway success, though, has been the tomatoes. Six plants with proper space and airflow have cropped better than last year’s jungle of ten. ‘Sungold’, as always, produced huge trusses heaving with sweet orange cherries.
The new trials were mixed. ‘Gardener’s Ecstasy’ gave small red fruits in long trusses. The flavour was fine, but nothing to celebrate. ‘Honeycomb’ lived up to its reputation as the sweetest tomato: exquisite flavour with proper tomato punch. Unfortunately, this was the crop flattened under seven tonnes of collapsing peas, so it struggled but still produced a fair harvest. Lastly, ‘Crimson Crush’ were the spares I shoved into the cutting garden, and you already know how that ended.
Lesson learned: Give outdoor tomatoes space and airflow. Sungold remains king, Honeycomb deserves a second chance, and peas should come with a health warning.
Bed Six – The great shame
Okay, we are nearly there. Ready for the abysmal onions? Bed Six, here we come.
A third of this bed was given to potatoes. It seemed like a good idea, but in the end rather pointless. The remaining two-thirds went to my favourite onion, ‘Rose de Roscoff’. Pink, sweet, and Raymond Blanc’s favourite onion.
I had multi-sown them, four or five seedlings per module cell, as usual. Forty clumps were planted out, and I sat back imagining a harvest of 160 to 200 juicy bulbs.
Two things then happened. Actually, one did not happen. I did not check my notes. If I had, I would have read: “Bed Six has onion white rot! Do not plant onions in there!!!”
The second thing was my daft assumption that onions would cope just fine growing within a bed of towering sweetcorn. “The onions will be harvested long before the corn gets that tall,” I told myself.
Inevitably, the onions failed almost entirely, thanks to the one-two punch of white rot and corn competition. Shaded out, soil sucked dry, they never stood a chance.
I now have a small basket of satsuma-sized onions, drying and curing in the wood store, quietly mocking me every time I walk past.
One sliver of joy came from the ‘Special Swiss’ sweetcorn. Although a few plants failed to produce anything, those that did were mouth-wateringly sweet and delicious. Even so, I think I will return to ‘Swift F1’, by far the best I have tried.
Lesson learned: never ignore your own notes, and never expect onions to thrive in the shadow of giants.
So what else went right?
Courgettes, as ever, produced enough fruit to sink a battleship. They carried on pumping out more and more.
Romanesco is the variety I grow. It is a traditional Italian type with firm, ridged fruits and great flavour. In this garden they are almost too productive. I have eaten my bodyweight in courgette pastas, fritters, tarts, and risottos, yet still they grow so large I could scoop out their middles and row down the Thames.
In a similar green vein, cucumber ‘Mini Munch’ was epic. Non-stop production from July and still going strong. The perfect cuc for two!
The squash have been just as phenomenal. I only sowed Red Kuri, as each plant produces two or three small fruits, perfect for two to four people. Firm, sweet, nutty flesh, and always reliable.
What I did not expect was a self-sown Crown Prince to appear. From a stray seed it surged away, smothering two beds, climbing three metres (ten feet) up the bank, and producing three whopping great fruits. Proof, if proof were needed, of how mild the winter was, for a squash seed to survive outdoors without protection.
Lesson learned: even when you think you are in charge, the courgettes and squash will always have the last laugh.
Lessons from this season
Plant crops and cover them immediately. Group plants with similar needs and heights so the covers can stay on.
Grow all pest-prone crops in the same bed so covers can be used efficiently.
Sow far more rocket and far fewer lettuces.
Do not be a moron and assume you know the height of a plant you have never grown before.
Jute netting may look suitably rustic, but it is garbage. Invest in metal or (dare I say) long-lasting plastic mesh.
Grow peas across the bed in blocks. If they collapse, they fall on each other rather than crushing neighbours.
Sweet peas always produce a bumper crop. Ten (not twenty) plants across the end of a 150 cm bed are plenty.
Two courgette plants are enough to feed half the village. Stop shoe-horning extras into every gap.
Stick with ‘Douce Provence’ and ‘Kelvedon Wonder’ peas: reliable, prolific, and sweet.
Potatoes: just grow Charlottes. Add Wilja if you want variety.
For reliability, whatever the weather, ‘Sungold’ reigns supreme. Give Honeycomb another go, but do not bury it under peas!
If you are underplanting sweetcorn, choose shade-tolerant crops like leafy salads or herbs. Broadcast sow green manure if you hate bare soil - phacelia is very pretty.
Onions need open, sunny ground, ideally without a single spore of onion white rot. You have been warned! Again!
Flowers in the raised beds may look pretty, but many are in the wrong place or simply grow too large. Consider returning them to artfully arranged terracotta pots.
Go and work on your veg-growing plan while these lessons are still fresh in your mind.
Final thoughts…
Success and failure, wins and losses. These are all part of the joy and trepidation of growing your own food. It is never a complete write-off. There is always something to eat, and it always tastes better than anything from a supermarket. You know it is fresh, you know what has gone into the soil, and that, my green-fingered friends, is priceless.
At the end of the day, even when the peas have flattened the tomatoes, the onions are sulking in the shadows, and the slugs are running a rave in the lettuce, you still get to eat something you grew yourself. And that always tastes like victory.
I really appreciate your company here. If you’d like to support these ramblings, tap the heart, share with a friend, or drop a comment, every little bit helps spread the word.
Curious about how to begin a veg patch? My Kitchen Garden series takes you through the whole process, from bare ground to (mostly) overflowing beds.
Cornerstones of my kitchen garden No.1
Welcome to a brand new series all about my Kitchen Garden and how to grow gorgeous, tasty, healthy, organic vegetables. It’s easier than you might imagine. Autumn and Spring are perfect times to begi…
Thank you , love the way you write, successes, failures and humour. I used to have an allotment but now attempt to grow just a few veg in containers with mostly fails but I will continue! Blackcurrant bushes are doing well though and rhubarb is looking happier now it’s been moved. Gooseberries not great but I live in hope! Your garden is fabulous,writing informative and fun . Thank you for still having the free option on Substack it’s appreciated.
Hello - great post. It’s been an upside down year here in Cheshire. My courgettes/french beans/runner beans that are normally prolific have been dismal. Beetroot, carrots and onions have had their best year ever. My problem is I don’t know what to put the success and failures down too! Also I grew my potatoes in big plastic tree pots and they have been good also. Get to harvest a little asparagus for the first time next year - just hope we’re not on holiday in the small picking window!