Day 98 - Pests and visitors, visitors and pests

Got lots of lovely pictures of a kitchen garden looking good! I was very proud of this, because, as I mentioned, I had had no experience of food production in a professional capacity. I had grown a few bits at home, and I had even had an allotment once, but I didn't much like having to go elsewhere to find my garden. At home I like to see the garden out of the window. An allotment half a mile up the road was not a joy every time I looked outside. And frankly, that experience was inadequate for the standards of presentation I felt obliged to provide in a garden open to the public, albeit one which had hardly any visitors. Busy little Scottish tourist town, teeming with people all summer, and we were getting only 10,000 a year. We had to provide something better to bring them in, I feared. So the baldy old bloke got busy -

That was in my first April. All the rest of the kitchen garden was dug and manured where necessary. This was the final piece, a spare area next to the fruit cage, where I intended to grow some perennial edibles, such as Artichokes, Cardoons and Asparagus, some rhubarb and some useful comfrey.

By July, the same area looked like this -

Progress in the rest of the beds was rapid from planting or sowing to harvest, as most of the veggies do their stuff in one season. By June we also  had the makings of a dried flower border in a relatively young state, although we would be harvesting some flowers in the first year from the stronger divisions -

The hedges were beginning to green up by now, and the fruit on the walls was looking better with leaves on to cover up their less than ideal shapes. As for vegetables, the early part of the season looked sparse, but promising. In the foreground the root crops were through the ground where we had sown seed, the potatoes to the right were lush and green, brassicas had been planted and the beans were just starting to move up their wigwams of bamboo canes -

The benefits of the shorter rows could be seen, and as you can observe, we tended to work from planks placed on the narrow pathways at this stage -

We were growing plenty of dwarf French Beans, purple, golden and green ones, as well as three different Runner Beans with white, red and bi-coloured flowers for ornament. We had space left over in that part of the rotation, and rather than give in to a surfeit of beans (we all know the consequences of that) I put part of the area down to Sweetcorn, planted in blocks, which ultimately were a success -

In the foreground we see part of the brassica plantings, with coir collars to keep the Cabbage Root Fly at bay organically. They are protected by netting to keep birds and Cabbage White butterflies off. All in all, my first attempt at this kind of gardening was looking very promising.