Success, failure and lessons you have learned

[elleme]

Lessons I learned from sowing in spring 2014:

Some supermarket tomatoes are worth sowing. 'Angelle' cherry plum toms gave me my best and tastiest tomato crop ever in the greenhouse, although the plants grew huge so I didn't have space for much else in there.

But don't bother with unnamed supermarket pepper seeds. Cropped poorly, not very tasty and suffered pest attacks, so I might only bother again with a variety meant for cooler climates.

Lessons I learned so far from veg sown summer/autumn for overwintering...

Don't sow golden purslane. The garden snails loved it. I didn't.

Sow lamb's lettuce. Largely ignored by pests, hardy and quite productive as a cut and come again veg. Admittedly snipping off the small leaves is fiddly, but it suits the small space I have for growing.

Grow more kale. It was one of my favourite veg anyway, but the home grown leaves are much nicer than supermarket bought and I find its frilly leaves quite ornamental.

On the same note grow 'bright lights' chard rather than the white variety I tried previously. Looks prettier and I didn't notice that the white was any milder tasting.

[elleme]

Other success undercover - I learned that overwintered chillies can crop really well on an indoors windowsill. I was going to move them into the greenhouse but never had the room due to monster tomatoes. Initially I was hand pollinating but they were still cropping even when I didn't do it for ages.

[Dorothy rouse]

Romanesque ?

Romanesque ( is that the way to spell it?) don't think so, but anyway, e's it did grow, large plants, took up a lot of space, but produced only small 'heads', tasted nice though but not worth the effort or the space.