Hi everyone,
I wonder whether I could get some advice on what veggies might do well in our garden. This is only our second year in the UK (coming from Australia) and I'm just not sure what will do well here.
We live in Oxford and have a small South-East facing garden, but on the Western side of it all the way along is a very tall building, so it only gets sun for half the day. As soon as the sun goes behind the building next door just after lunchtime or maybe a bit later in summer the garden is completely in shade.
Last year I tried green beans, which did exceptionally well. So I will definitely be planting those again. I also tried tomatoes. I had some tiny cherry tomatoes (hundreds & thousands they were called) in planting bags, which did very well. But the regular tomatoes I had in the ground didn't do so well. They grew well and set lots of fruit, but then the fruit just turned black and mushy before they even ripened. So it looks like I got some sort of disease in them, probably due to there not being quite enough sunshine to keep them strong and disease-resistant. Fortunately I harvested about half of them green and make green tomato chutney before they got sick, so they weren't all wasted.
I also tried courgettes, which didn't do very well either. I love courgettes, so would really like them to work.Chillies also didn't do great. I got some fruit on them, but I don't think it was warm enough for them to ripen. I harvested some green ones right at the end of the growing season, but I think it only amounted to about 3.
I haven't had any success with spinach either. I tried a few times but it always went straight to seed. I sowed some in a big plastic box outside in autumn and that is actually looking very promising, provided it doesn't got to seed again. I've also got some kohlrabi growing from autumn still (they're very small) and some chard (again, very small still).
We've got strawberries which do alright, and I also had some mange-touts which did alright. I wondered about growing sweetcorn this year, because I'd like something tall to hide the corner next to the shed with the compost bins, but I don't like their chances of growing well in limited sun.
The other complication is that I kind of have to stick to the edges of the garden when planting veggies, which reduces the sunshine further, because it wouldn't be fair on the kids to plants veggies all through the middle of the tiny garden and then constantly get annoyed with them for stepping on them or throwing balls at them
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. In fact, if anyone else happens to live in Oxford I would love to meet fellow veggie gardeners. None of the friends we've made here so far are into gardening.
Juli
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