The end of the growing season

 The days are getting shorter and the nights are growing colder, so here on the edge of the Australian Alps Easter usually marks the end of the growing season.

This year's not been the best, dry then cold and wet in spring. 

We did get some decent broad beans and early potatoes, but the capsicums and chillis were a total failure this year and both the tomatoes and zucchini nearly so.

After the possums, who've never been much of a problem in previous years, destroyed my zucchini and tomato plants several times over I resorted to rearing them in cages.

The zucchini were really started too late and didn't do much more than produce a lot of leaf, but the tomatoes finally came sort of ok while we were away in Tasmania. 

In normal years we usually have an embarrassingly large crop and it doesn't matter if the local wildlife steal a few, but this year it was a race with the pouched demons as to who got there first.

There are still a few green tomatoes left, but the plants are beginning to visibly die off, so I suspect that next week's threatened few days of cold and wet will kill them off.

We still have a couple of smallish Japanese kobacha pumpkins that are still growing. I'd expect to harvest them towards the end of April about the time of the local pumpkin festival, and that will be that for 2024's growing season.

Still, I'll be planting my broad beans in May and hoping for a better growing year in 2024-5 ....

[Update 30/03/2024]

Conversations with other gardeners suggest its not just me - other people have had problems with possums and zucchini and tomatoes not cropping.

The local possum population is obviously hungry - some have even resorted to trying (and rejecting) windfall lemons. 

At the same time it wasn't the zucchini plants not flowering, it was the lack of a crop, suggesting a lack of pollinating insects, and that is worrying...