Small Garden harvests reduce, a quick look back at autumn and forwards at problems looming

Minty and I are updating you. Small garden coming into December now, pre-winter, and it's been a disappointing autumn here. It's not often I say that. Yeah, it's okay. Some things are good. Like we got white sprouting broccoli there that I thought got hammered by slugs soon after I put it in in July, and it's made it through. It's undersown with beetroot actually, so there's a double harvest there. That's the most successful corner of the garden at the moment. Actually, the cauliflower under the mesh there are also looking okay. There's a couple that got a bit slugged. That's a variety of Roscoff. It should come for harvest in May, all being well. But I don't know if you remember, we had cauliflower here overwintering last year, and that came to nothing. Something was wrong with the seed selection, I would say. It just didn't do it, and so I ended up twisting that. But we had beetroot here, and they were good. There was nearly six kilos of beetroot harvest there. That's broad beans that I sowed around three weeks ago, early November. Nice time in this climate to sow broad beans, and they'll survive the winter, all being well, as small plants. You don't actually want them much bigger than that at this time of year, so that's a nice thing. And the strawberries also look promising. I could tidy them off a bit, probably find a few snails if I do that. So we've got the marshmallow there and Florence here. And then lamb's lettuce, self-sowed here. Well, I left it to self-sow, so I've collected seeds from that, and that's what's come up here. So some of this lamb's lettuce is good to harvest now. That's winter salad. Lamb's lettuce is absolutely one of the best winter salads you can have in terms of easiness, because it takes any amount of frost more than those cabbage. So that's why they're looking poor. I kind of gave up on this corner. I'm ashamed to say it, but I really did, because initially so much slug damage. And then the roots from these hedges and the trees, actually, they're getting bigger. They're more than they were when I started in here, and I'm slightly wondering how to go forwards with this small garden, actually, in this corner particularly. And those cabbage, I kind of left them as a reminder of the slug difficulties of summer. But more problem than that is that that was nice spring onions in that corner, and they're not there anymore. And again, I think it must be slugs. They've just chomped off. There's so many in that corner. We've got such a high population I'm sure that many of you have got this issue. What are we going to do about it? I don't know. Part of me is struggling. I'm okay in the main garden. It's gardens like this where you've got so much edge where the slugs can hide and make habitat. I'm going to have a think about that. There's got to be something we can do. In terms of soil preparation, we've put one-year-old homemade compost on here, a slightly younger compost there, and I'm going to put a bit of woodchip on pathways. So that's a good thing to do on the paths. We're just putting up a video about that. Probably the next video going up on my channel, long form, will be about woodchip in some detail, show you different ways of doing it. So mulching is the job if you haven't done it for the winter. Compost on beds, a bit of woodchip on paths, and you're ready for spring.