Martin Brown wrote:
Purple sprouting broccolli, sprouts and calabrese are fun and not too
difficult. And fresh lettuce just from the garden tastes nicer than
supermarket grown. Though you end up with a glut if not careful.

I had some good purple last year, but this year's was a failure, and I'm not
sure I've got any coming for this winter. Sprouts are always too small and
fiddley to deal with, and are just as cheap to buy! Although I do have 49
plants on the go atm. :-) All a bit small cos they went in a bit late,
though.

I am not a fan of lettuce, and the times I've tried growing it, it's either
died or bolted, then been fed to the chickens. I have a load in the
coldframe in the garden, destined for the chickens, all bought at 5-10p a
strip from B+Q last weekend! We shall see.

Ones that are nicer home grown, but a bit of a pain to grow:
* sweetcorn
Slug ate all mine at 4" tall this year.

Ours were doing well, we thought, but then they just stopped growing. Got
to about 4' tall and then ...

Raspberries are fairly easy and with the right varieties available for a
fair chunk of time and not too heavily pinched by the birds. Other
fruits like blackcurrants, blueberries and jostaberries need netting to
get any crop at all.

I had no problem at all with my red and black currants, possibly cos there
are so many plants that the birds could never eat them all! :-)

Raspberries are a bit of a bugbear of mine atm, as - I don't know if it's
the variety (we inheritted them on the plot), but they seem to go from
unripe to overripe and squishy /awfully/ quickly. The yellow ones seem to
last a lot longer on the branch before turning to squish. I'm seriously
tempted to bin the lot (and there are a /lot/) and start with fresh ones.
:-(

I like growing unusually coloured cultivars. Purple or white carrots,
yellow courgettes, black tomatoes (actually not worth it at all), yellow
ones are fun tho.

Me too! Although they always seem to be such a disappointment. :-(
Couldn't agree more about the black tomatoes - tasteless and squishy, every
variety we've tried! May have another go with a different one next year,
but I'm not holding out hope. Did get some lovely pink cherry tomatoes this
year (I believe they were 'garden pearl', which I believed to be red, but
whatever it was, they were definitely pink!), and a new favourite for
reliability on the yellow - 'vova yellow' (seeds picked up from Hampshire
potato day) did exceptionally well for me this year.

But nothing beats my GD for taste! :-D

Yellow courgettes I've never managed to get going well, no idea why - best
we get is always the 'green bush' courgettes, which crop and crop forever
(picked some just this weekend still!), but the yellows always either don't
germinate, or like this year, they are the ones eaten by the slugs when the
green ones are left untouched! (And yes, I mean the plants, pre-fruit, so
no idea why!!)

I usually let one marrow plant have the oldest compost
heap to itself. This time of year we have apples and Japanese nashi
pears. Tend to end up with way too many chillis.

We did chilli plants last year, and none got touched.

Heroic failures include aubergines and asparagus which really doesn't
like our heavy clay soil. I get a couple of stalks per plant per year
and strawberries have invaded the bed...

Our aubergines were a bit of a failure too - like the melons, they all
started fruiting way too late, no idea why. :-( Last year we got loads,
though. The asparagus also not doing well - too much asparagus beetle, I
think.