Day 99 - All the colour you can eat

After all that heavy preparation work, all the other gardeners and I had to do was sit back and wait for everything to grow. And a bit of weeding, of course, mowing the lawns, propagating, pruning, watering (it was a rare wonderful summer), harvesting, bagging up for sale, planning future improvements......I could go on. I usually do. But not today. What I intend to do today is show you a few photographs of the kitchen garden in its full explosion of productive growth. All the pictures were taken in July, and testify to one of my deliberate intentions in the planning of the garden - I wanted it to serve an ornamental purpose as well as providing edible produce for sale. I already mentioned yesterday how I grew beans in a variety of colour forms to make them visually interesting. I also concentrated on putting colour into the brassica and salad borders as well.

So, one photograph after another with little comment between. First the fruit cage, now fully planted and with the protective netting in place -

And again -

Then a close-up, showing the fruit Scotland is rightfully renowned for, bags of which we sold that year in the shop -

We also managed to pick and sell some strawberries from our brand-new plants -

The dried flower border was thriving by now -

and as can be seen in this shot, we had already been harvesting shallotts and onions-

My approach to onion growing differed from what had been traditional in this and many other gardens. We were not growing for exhibition to produce huge bulbs which were of limited use in the kitchen. I wanted to sell people compact onions that would store well, so I planted the sets close together, at around 2-3" apart so that by harvest time they would be touching one another. I also placed the rows close together, about 6" apart, just enough to get the hoe between them. In this way I was able to lift a phenomenal amount of onions from a relatively small area, and they sold well. See how close, through a gap in the hedge which had once been a path -

As for colour, you can't beat salad crops. However, these weren't a reliable seller as we had no cold storage, and really needed to be lifted on demand which we couldn't manage -

But it was also possible to provide beauty in the brassica section too, as can be seen in these Kale plants, which late in the season provided a superb show. We also grew purple and yellow cauliflowers, which in this picture hadn't yet reached maturity -

In the root vegetable department too, beetroot could be relied on to provide a show, and here we grew purple, yellow and striped varieties, alongside purple, yellow and white carrots which looked good in the shop displayed beside the orange ones, even if they didn't show in the ground -

And let's not stop there - what about Swiss Chard? It doesn't get much better than that in your food garden -

The overall impression was lush, bright, full of colour. The setting was beautiful, and apart from the irritation of the misbehaving holidaymakers in the house, I'm not sure that I've ever been happier in my life. I would go back to live there in a shot. However, before I tell you how it all came to an end, I have quite a number of other gardening matters to show. Let's face it, I haven't even put up any pictures yet of the other garden, which was the one with the unique horticultural history, and I haven't dwelt much on the other side of this one, the ornamental or leisure garden. Plenty of time for that.