A summer of surprises

Well, that wasn't quite the summer I was expecting. No heatwaves to frazzle the foliage; plentiful rain to fill the tanks and swell the tomatoes; below-average temperatures that stubbornly refused to ripen the rockmelons.

Here's my scorecard for my various gardening endeavours this summer, from 0 (complete failure) to 10 (complete success)

Tomatoes: 11
Huge, tasty, prolific. My Amish Paste produced lots of half-kilo monsters like this one and is still going strong.

Eggplants: 0
Nice, healthy plants, no fruit. Not one.

Rockmelons: 1
Plenty of fruit, but not enough heat to ripen them. Most of the fruit were rather tasteless. I think I'm giving up on rockmelons, as they're clearly marginal in my garden.

Onions: 9
Good spring rain produced a nice crop of compact, juicy bulbs. I pulled them just in time to survive the worst of the wet weather in January.

Potatoes: 8
Not a huge number of spuds, but they were of excellent size and great taste. Why is it that I can never, ever find the last potato? Even after a thorough dig over by our chooks, the potato bed produced an unexpected second crop.

Pumpkins: 5
Not what I expected. I was confidently expecting a good crop of 1-2 kg rich orange Potimarron heirlooms like these ones from a couple of years ago.

… instead I got a handful of 5 kg greenish monsters like this one. Obviously someone at Diggers wasn't paying attention.

I could go on, but you get the picture. A decidedly mixed bag. But wouldn't it be boring if everything always turned out as planned? If you aren't reliant on one type of crop, there are always successes to compensate for the failures - and failures to stop you getting too big-headed about your successes.