Garden Report 2014 - My beginner's attempt at gardening and seed saving....

[Tibbs735]

So a while ago I ordered a pack of seeds from Real Seeds, the "Feed the Family" gift seed pack:
http://www.realseeds.co.uk/giftcollections.html

I know a little about gardening and growing food from growing up with a garden and veggie patch etc and wanted to avoid the common prepper syndrome of buying a "survival pack" of seeds, ticking off a box on the big list and moving on. The aim was to produce at least enough of each seed to produce a second generation. I'll do a general breakdown of the results so far with each plant, as I suspect some seed only after a second year (groan):

Sanguina beetroot - Very good, needs to be harvested and put away into boxes of wet sand, with some left to go to seed.

Giant Limousin turnip - Same as beetroot, starting to get wormed so need picking.

Aquadulce longpod broad bean - All picked, most frozen, some left for seed; they've gone completely black and dry

Red Ursa kale - Very productive so far, but suffered a plague of caterpillars and some larger plants starting rotting due to water accumulating so we essentially coppiced some, aggressively trimmed the others of dying leaves, and they are now doing well as most of the butterflies are gone...

Fordhook Giant chard - Doing well, largely pest free, tastes good

Touchon carrot - Starting to show signs of carrot fly and possibly end rot, otherwise producing loads of non-photogenic carrots

Bleu de Solaise leek - Leeks everywhere, filling up almost all the odd bits of plot space.

Australian Yellowleaf lettuce - Pretty good, could do with a few more rows, bug free.

Sobi chinese salad/cooking green - Poor, lots of holes, attracts pests. More trouble than it's worth so far.

Joan swede - Doing OK, suffering under caterpillars.

Czar runner bean - Loads of beans, more than we can eat. 5 stars.

Galina tomato - Pretty good, some issues with blight but we survived by removing the affected leaves.

Purple Ukraine tomato - Strange colour, will be interesting to see how they turn out. Same blight scare avoided.

Striato di Napoli courgette - 5 out of 6 destroyed by slugs, one survived and is not too productive.