Reflecting upon summer crops

I have heard it said that many people expect to be able to buy common fruits and vegetables all year round. I wonder if that's true. I personally don't have such expectations. Maybe that's because I'm a vegetable gardener, and that experience has shown me the difficulties of growing good crops. There's the obvious problem that a lot of species don't grow well at all times of the year. But there's also the multitude of other problems - pests, diseases, drought, too much rain, rain at inopportune times, low temperatures, high temperatures, and so on. Sometimes I can give my best efforts toward growing good food but it just doesn't work out because nature has other ideas. 

I was recently considering the differences in yields from this summer compared to last summer. 

Summer of 2022-23. That was a good season for cucumbers, beans, maize, millet, watermelons, carrots and sweet potatoes. But my pumpkins, tomatoes and capsicums (sweet peppers) all struggled. 

This present summer of 2023-24. Nearly everything struggled except for tomatoes and pumpkins. The sweet potatoes seem to be growing well, but I haven't harvested them yet. And I have grown two new crops this season, ginger and peanuts, which have good growth so far but are yet to be harvested. My watermelons had started well, but most of them split after some very hot weather alternated with many days of heavy rain. 

So I've begun to wonder what I might do differently next summer. I think that I might reduce the number of varieties that I grow, and instead focus on the strong performers with high yields per square metre. I tend to want to grow as many different crops as I can because of my curious nature. But it might be better to change that habit. The more that I can grow well and in good quantities, the less I will have to buy from the shop. This should allow me to dedicate more growing space to each crop, stagger the plantings more, and providing for a longer harvesting window. 

Another opportunity is to trial some more resilient varieties. I have already started moving away from growing Roma tomatoes toward growing cherry type ones. And I might move away from Golden Nugget pumpkins toward a different one. 

Whatever the coming year of gardening yields I'm looking forward to learning from it and trying to adapt the best that I can.