Never again – some veg won't be making it back into my garden in future

I've come to the conclusion that I'm never going to try the vegetables in this post again (or at the very least not until I'm such an experienced gardener that I know how to overcome the problems I've had with them).

1. Purple sprouting broccoli (or any other sort of broccoli)

This picture looks pretty good and I'm hoping to eat it soon, but it took me more than a metre square of soil to grow what is probably less than one portion worth. Part of the problem is that it grew taller than the netting I had put up, so most of it ended up exposed and outside the netting in autumn and winter. This resulted in most of it being eaten:

There don't seem to be many plants that insects - especially caterpillars - flock to more than broccoli and even the normal broccoli I've grown in the past has ended up more caterpillar than floret by mass. So this is the last time I will be trying broccoli unless I can get my insect netting situation a lot more sorted.

2. Celery

I don't know what Mr Fothergill did to get his celery sticks to look like the ones on the packet, but mine had only reached a few spindly millimetres thick by the time the first frost came in the autumn, and they looked pretty manky by then anyhow. My guess is he grew them under glass or in another country. At any rate, it proved a complete waste of space for me and the Internet says I'm not the only one. Celery is somewhere between hard and impossible to grow to full size outdoors in the UK (and all my other salad vegetables were over long before the celery had even the faintest hope of being ready).

3. Cabbage

Cabbage definitely has the potential to be successful in the UK, but you need to be in a low slug and snail area (or to use a ton of slug killer) and to protect it from caterpillars. Even with all my best attempts with copper slug collars and the occasional fit of slug pelleting, I only got about 2 cabbages worth of cabbage out of about 1.5 sqm of earth (and even then I had to pick the slugs and snails out). Protecting them from caterpillars is definitely easier than protecting them from slugs, so if you live in a low slug area, then just cover your cabbages in butterfly netting and watch them grow. These plants are happy to grow to full size in the UK, the problem is how yummy creepy crawlies find them.

4. Cauliflower

Actually, I'm going to be attempting to grow a romanesco cauliflower because they look so cool, but only one or two of them, as I doubt it will work. I am yet to manage to fertilise them sufficiently for them to grow more than the sparsest of florets. This year's romanescos will be swaddled in manure and hope.

5. Fennel

These grew stalks and leaves absolutely fine. The problem is a) you're supposed to eat the bulbous base of this particular variety of fennel and those stayed quite small, and b) I only actually know one recipe using this and the effort to deliciousness ratio isn't worth it. If I had successfully grown them I'm sure I could have overcome my lack of good recipes – or at least found one with a better taste to work ratio. But they didn't even grow to usable levels, so they're out. On a side note, I had no pest or disease problems with them at all, so it's a shame they didn't do better.