RHS Day Course.

Happy Fathers' Day.  Belatedly...
This Fathers' Day, my present was a day course at RHS Harlow Carr in growing Organic Vegetables.
What a cool present!
I arrived slightly late (which I blame entirely on the fact that the roads around Wetherby have been re-routed since Googlemaps wrote my directions - it has absolutely nothing to with the fact that I left the house after the latest-possible-time-I-could-leave-and-still-make-it-in-time)

Foolishly, I didn't take many pictures on my phone, but loads on the proper camera, which demands that I downsize them before uploading them...  Hey ho.
Anyways, we started with a classroom-based session that went through loads of the theory.  Some of it I obviously already knew, but it was good to have it all consolidated and built on.  There were, predictably, a couple of people in attendance who would have happily spoken all day about their own area of expertise, but thankfully there wasn't much room for that.  There wasn't, in fact, much room in my day for anything...  We looked at soil, environment, green manures, pest and disease control, weed control, as well as various other things.  Lunch was a mad dash around the garden for me (well, a very small patch of the rather large site.)  It was also sweet pea day, so a few pictures of sweet peas might sneak in...

But the excitement of lunch was that the Gardeners' World team were recording that day, so I got to see them in action.

That's Rachel de Thame doing her thing, and a whole bunch of members of the public being resolutely British and ignoring the fact that there's a camera crew in the middle of the garden.
The afternoon session was spent outside (yay!) and the weather held off for it, which was a relief, given I'd not bothered to take any sort of waterproofing items...
We sowed some green manure in a raised bed in the veg garden.

Well, as it happens, I sowed some green manure in the raised bed.  I'm hoping to get regular updates on its progress from the gardening team...

The veg area itself was pretty impressive, though staggering to think that it was much smaller than you would have found on a country house estate many years ago.  Here's the rhubarb patch:

And here are some other bits of the fruit and veg area.

 And here is a view that gives you a small idea of the large scale...

Sorry it's a little blurry...
And here are some flower shots.  I like the last one the best.

I said it was nice, didn't I.
All-in-all, it was a fab day, and I had a lovely time.  Just a shame that I had to leave early to get back for a youth group (which I was 45 minutes late for anyway, because the traffic was worse on the way down!)
Thanks to my lovely boys :)  (And, of course, to their lovely mother, who obviously had to do the organising of it!)