My Hits and Misses of the 2023–24 Summer Vegetable Season

A review of what worked well and what I'll do differently next time

The summer of 2023–24 threw some challenges to gardeners in south-eastern Australia. We came into the planting season on the back of an extremely dry September and October. Things were looking grim as I began planting my summer crops. On the plus side, by the end of November the grass had stopped growing and I thought I was going to have a fairly relaxed summer in terms of garden maintenance.

But it all changed on Christmas Eve. In the 30 days from Christmas Eve onwards we received 226 mm of rainfall, in the middle of summer. It was like I was suddenly growing in the sub-tropics, a far cry from the cool-temperate climate of Kyneton!

It was also the windiest summer I can ever remember. It wasn’t a particularly warm summer, but that wind was unrelenting.

Every year in April, as the frosts put an end to my summer crops, I reflect on the season just gone. The growing season is fresh in my mind so it is the perfect time to record in my gardening diary all sorts of ideas.

• What should I grow more of next year? And less of?

• What crops did well and what performed poorly?

• What did I grow too much of?

• What crops do I need to increase in size to meet demand?

• What should I do differently?

I also do a quick stocktake of my seed collection and put together a shopping list for next planting season, which begins in just a few short months.

Want to know more about planning your vegetable patch for abundance next summer? Come along to my upcoming Seasonality and Timing workshop on July 20.

Here are a few of the hits and misses from my patch this summer. I wonder how many successes and failures we shared? Please post your reflections on the growing season in the comment section below.

Sweet success in the corn field

I tweaked the timing of my successive crops of sweet corn and got it just right this year. I usually have trouble with an overlap of the harvest of the last two crops. This creates a glut and sometimes wasted corn cobs. This time I stretched the planting time out between these crops and it worked perfectly.

My first crop of corn was a failure. I was too optimistic in starting sweet corn in the ground in September. However, the challenge was compounded by the fact that I was using seed with a poor germination rate. I purchased a bag of bulk sweet corn from my usual supplier, but it turns out they were retiring and must have sent me the dregs of their corn seed. Once I realised what was going on, I persisted with the poor seed but tweaked my planting strategy. I increased the number of seeds sown per irrigation drip hole from two to four. 

Occasionally, more than one sweet corn seed germinated and we were able to thin the plants. Overall, despite the massive oversowing, I still had some vacant drip holes in need of sweet corn seedlings.

I usually advocate for directly sowing sweet corn as the seedlings are prone to transplant shock. But I experimented with sowing seeds into Hiko cells in the greenhouse at the same time I planted each crop. This gave me the opportunity to transplant seedlings into the vacant spots that formed. What I found surprised me. If I could transplant the seedlings when they were still quite small (a maximum of 10 days post germination) then they tended to establish well and show very little sign of any transplant shock.

I’ve decided I can still plant a sweet corn crop in September and it might be successful. It’ll just have to be started off in the greenhouse and then transplanted. I’ll give it a go this spring and let you know how I get on.

A big win in the pumpkin patch

I’ve successfully grown and harvested hundreds of pumpkins over the years. I thought my plan to grow pumpkin vines to act as a living mulch underneath my fruit trees was sound. However, for the first two years I tried this, the vines struggled. Any pumpkin vines growing elsewhere, such as under my sweet corn (like a three sisters garden), were very productive, but they never took off under the fruit trees.

What was the difference this year? I upped the soil preparation. I dug holes one metre wide and 50 cm deep and back-filled each hole with a half a wheelbarrow of compost.

I also upped the watering. Previously the pumpkin row in the orchard had been on the same drip irrigation system as the fruit trees, which was activated only once per week. This summer I made some changes to the infrastructure and connected the pumpkins’ irrigation lines to the “market garden” beds. The daily watering regime was clearly appreciated and I was well rewarded.

This year I nailed it. The pumpkins thrived and I picked heaps of fruit to store and use over winter.

Swamped watermelons and sweet potatoes

In the past, I’ve reliably grown both watermelons and sweet potatoes here in Kyneton. This year I was set to do the same. I thought I’d grow both as ground covers among the sweet corn. However, all that rain in December and January made the sweet corn grow much stronger than usual. It also made the weeds grow.

Black nightshade (Solanum nigrum) is an annual weed that proliferates in summer. This year it absolutely thrived and I couldn’t weed it from the patch fast enough. The rampant growth of the sweetcorn and black nightshade completely choked the watermelon and all but one of the sweet potato plants. These two marginal crops couldn’t handle the shade thrown by the corn and nightshade.

Next year I’ll go back to giving both the watermelon and sweet potato crops a lot more room to thrive.

Mixed messages from the carrot patch

Carrots can be an incredibly high yielding crop from a small space. Get it right and you’ll never need to eat a store-bought carrot again. Usually I do get it right, from sowing just one crop of carrots per year.

This year I had lots of trouble starting my carrot seed. The first sowing completely failed. I think it was a dodgy packet of seed. I tried fresh seed for my second attempt and it germinated well, but then slugs or earwigs wiped out small patches around the edge of the crop. There weren’t going to be quite enough carrots to get us through the next 12 months.

So I sowed a third attempt into another bed. I sowed this crop in early December, and some of the days immediately after were a bit windy and hot. The soil must have dried out a bit too much on one of the days, and again, germination was sparse. (More tips for starting carrot seed here.)

The result was two sparse patches of carrots. This at least has given them the room to thrive and we have pulled up some absolute stonkers (as the kids call them). Most of the roots are big, fat, straight and long. So it hasn’t been all that bad that there aren’t as many of them to harvest.

We’re also getting the odd funky carrot that’s been “sculpted” by root knot nematodes.

I’ll soon be pulling all of our carrots from the ground to store them in big tubs of sand. More on that here.

Runner beans didn’t make it to the finish line

Runner beans are easy to grow. Or so I thought. This year mine struggled. I grow a mixture of varieties in the same crop. It’s a way of hedging your bets so that different varieties can thrive during periods of seasonal variation. Well, virtually none of my mixed varieties thrived, except for a few plants that produced flat, stringy pods. They weren’t the nicest to eat. The mixture produced virtually no purple or yellow bean pods. Faced with heavy rainfall, clearly these varieties were not resilient.

It’s back to the drawing board for my mixed varieties of runner beans.

Zucchini harvest equilibrium

The zucchini productivity in my patch was as close to perfect as it comes. Normally I have a one zucchini plant rule in our household. This helps to prevent a massive glut. However, this year I planted a second, as part of the Fool’s Garden experiment. Then I was worried that come late January we were going to drown in zucchini.

However, all that rainfall created ideal conditions for powdery mildew and the zucchini were quickly covered in the stuff. The yellow ladybirds moved in for a feast.

Powdery mildew and the fungus-eating ladybird (Illeis glabula) thrived in my garden this summer.

I thought the plants were done for before the glut had even kicked in. But then February was very dry. The incessant wind helped provide good airflow. The plants were hampered by the fungal disease, but each plant still managed to produce a single zucchini a week. In our family two zucchini a week is perfect. So thanks to the over-planting of the Fool’s Garden and the interplay of the powdery mildew, we achieved the holy grail of vegetable gardening: zucchini equilibrium.

Cucumbers not up to the crunch

The overplanting of zucchini might have worked wonders, but I struggled with my cucumbers this year. I grew three crops in succession, and crops one and two produced well. However, crop one suffered an early demise thanks to the powdery mildew.

The last of the cucumbers for 2024. My third crop never really hit its straps because the cool weather of autumn kicked in just before the plants hit their prime.

Succession planting allows you to spread your harvest over a longer period of time. It also ensures that any seasonal variation can be overcome. For example, if I had relied on one single crop of cucumbers, we would hardly have harvested a single fruit after late January. My extra crops allowed me to continue harvesting until late in the season. Overall, though, the yields were very much down on previous years.

Tried and tested crops that just keep on giving

Some of my other crops ignored seasonal variations and just did their thing. The following crops thrived just like they always do.