Toxic Plants

  With the year end approaching, it’s time to reflect on what went well and what went badly in the allotment in the last season, try to learn from your mistakes and do better next year. Programmes featuring celebrity gardeners like Alan Titchmarsh make gardening appear easy, and you might think that all fruit and vegetables turn out perfectly as planned. The reality is that gardening, especially edible gardening, is hard work and there are lots of mistakes and failures along the way. In this blog I’m going to concentrate mostly on the failures and see what we can learn from them. I’ve divided this year’s plantings into five categories: Turned out perfectly with minimal effort Turned out well but could do even better next year The jury’s still out; too soon to say Turned out badly but may be salvageable next year if I do things differently; Complete waste of time: don’t bother even trying that again Turned out perfectly with minimal effort Onions, potatoes, rhubarb and main crop strawbe