Year one: lessons learned

I think I harvested more in lessons learned for next year than I did in vegetables from my patch this year. I have now pulled up the rest of my vegetables (except for some leeks which are still growing, but may well not survive the replacement of our fences). So, here are my lessons:
Lesson 1: Space

Many vegetables need a lot more space than I gave them credit for. Because of their outer leaves, they get a lot bigger than the vegetable you see in the shops. If it weren't for slugs and snails eating holes in the cabbage leaf in the picture above, the cauliflower beneath it would barely be able to see daylight. If the seed packet says space them 30 cm apart, treat that as a minimum, not a maximum requirement. Also, my failure to give them enough space meant that it was easy for slugs and snails to crawl from one plant to the next across all the touching leaves, thwarting my barrier attempts to protect some of my plants with copper slug rings. Which brings me on to:
Lesson 2: Slugs, snails and insect pests

Although I largely successfully protected my cabbages from caterpillars I only got to eat about two leaves of them because they got ravaged by slugs and snails and other insect pests. I think I may have to become less organic about my approach to slug and snail control next year and I'm also planning to use either agricultural fleece or insect netting over my cabbages (if I grow them), as they don;t need pollinating, but do need protecting from pretty much everything. I'd like to be organic about my growing, so I may have another go with copper if I manage to get raised beds in. The plan is to run copper tape around all of the outside of the planks around the raised bed. However, I'm still not confident that will work. I killed dozens and dozens of slugs and snails this year (I'd guess more than 100), but it was never enough. They still decimated my crops. So, there will be non-organic slug pellets around my brassicas and legumes next year to try and reduce the garden's population of molluscs, and then the next year I'll see if I can go organic again.
Lesson 3: Fertilise, fertilise, fertilise

A lot of my plants simply did not have enough nutrients available to them to grow properly. I threw a bit of organic fertiliser about once, but I should have thrown a lot more around repeatedly and ideally I should have added more compost to the soil than I did too. I wouldn't even have needed to dig it in. If I'd spread compost over the top of the soil it would have worked its own way down, as that's what compost does.
Lesson 4: Late June is a bit late to be sowing seeds or planting out seedlings in England

Despite the fact I only planted plants whose seed packets said June was still OK for sowing, my rocket bolted really quickly (it probably wouldn't have been so desperate to flower so quickly if planted earlier in the year).

Although the two beans that grew at all were looking pretty healthy at this point, this was way too small for late September and I don't think I'd have ended up with any beans even if the plants hadn't all been eaten in the past couple of weeks.

Also, some of my veg failed to get to a decent size despite me leaving them in for months (in fairness, I'm not 100% certain if this was a late sowing or a fertlise, fertilise, fertilise problem).
The radishes worked out pretty OK (alright, I had all sorts of difficulties with them, but June being too late to plant them wasn't one of them as far as I can tell), and the leeks may still work out, as they still have some growing time left until their latest harvesting date of January.
Lesson 5: Use proper bamboo sticks as support sticks instead of found wood

I have strong suspicions that those holes in the sticks I was using could be woodworm and I have my fingers crossed that it either hasn't infected anything else or has only infected the fence - which is about to be replaced. In case, like me, you don't live within walking distance of a garden centre and can't fit sticks as long as you need in your car, you can always order sticks online. These sticks have now gone in a green waste bag and will be going off to the council for composting and sterilisation.

On the plus side, all the veg that I ripped up has pretty much filled my compost heap and added a load of greens (nitrogen-rich organic matter), which is good because I have a load of browns (carbon-rich organic matter) that I'm about to add when I cut down a load of bushes around the garden, and that should balance it nicely.

The vegetable patch is now down to just a few remaining leeks and a solitary carrot.