Year 2: lessons learned

I learned a lot of lessons this year, some of which feel very much like year two lessons about running a full vegetable patch and some of which feel a lot more basic. One of my basic lessons (and yet one that I'm still not sure I'm right on) was about the tomatoes. I don't think I put them in a sunny enough spot, as they ripened late and I wasn't consistent enough with the fertiliser, which may or may not have been why they went dark brown and rotten before quite a lot of them ripened. I should definitely have tied them to their canes more effectively so they weren't lying all over the floor. Earlier picking would also have been good. The ones I allowed to ripen on the vine got eaten by slugs.

A more appropriate year 2 lesson is that I discovered that celery matures really late, it's still not ready, so wasn't ready when any of my other salad veg was and no use as part of my summer salads. I'm not sure I'm going to bother with celery again, although I will be able to add it to the lunchtime soups I'm now moving onto to eat up my garden vegetables.
Also, I learnt that lettuce seedlings can only survive my gardens slugs if protected by cloches or copper rings (ideally squash-bottle cloches) and I should have planted them at more regular intervals.

I also screwed up the picking of the sweet corn. I picked it almost all too early or too late. Here's a picture of pretty much the only one I managed to pick at the right time (30 August for the record):

The problem was that because the very tip of it didn't look ripe to me, I thought it wasn't ready yet and left the rest of it longer. I now know better and have posted a post about when it is ready to pick here.
Another lesson: I am incapable of growing decent cauliflower, I won't bother again next year, I gave at least a passing shot at fertilising it, but clearly that wasn't enough. Jury's still out on the cabbage. I can grow it, but I didn't protect it enough from slugs and snails, and also, it's kind of a bitter, and I've noticed I have a distinct preference for the non-bitter, sweeter vegetables, like carrots. I might give red cabbage a go instead though, as that's not bitter, at least not after I've stewed it with apple.

Pea lesson: grow more mangetout and fewer/no peas. You get relatively few peas per plant and also they got infested with grubs, but the problem wasn't yet visible at the mangetout phase. Also, preparing mangetout is a lot less work than preparing peas and the relative costs of both at the supermarket mean growing mangetout saves you a fair bit of money, but peas are much cheaper from the freezer.

Final lesson for this post (very much a year 2, large vegetable patch lesson): I need to make a calendar of when things are due to be ready (like the runner beans) and plan my meals and holidays accordingly. I missed a lot of runner beans and peas because I didn't harvest them at the right time either because I was away on holiday or we were eating something they didn't go with. Kind of the same applies to the sweet corn, in part I left it on the plant for too long because we weren't eating anything it went well with.