Call me Foolish

Well it is not for me to say Vince, :wink: but you are not alone there are 2 people up at the allotments who have done the same today mate..!!! Will be interesting to see what happens now then... :D

 

I'm a couple of weeks behind you :(. I've usually got some of my beans planted out by now. I grow and plant them in rotation, normally planting the last lot out about mid June.

I don't use fleece but make a plastic cloche around the canes. I'll put a picture up when I get a moment. :thumb:

A couple of years ago I was getting enough beans by the first week in July to be able to sell some.

 

Here is a picture of what I do for my early beans.

I always cross the bean canes at a height of about 3ft. It is then easy to run plastic along the canes to make a cloche. It also makes it a lot easier for picking the beans as the upper ones hang down outside the canes. The bees seem to prefer it as well.

Another advantage is that the canes seem to resist much better the strong wind that sometimes blow off the field. Each can can flex individually so sudden strong gusts don't take the whole lot down.

I also grow them through weed suppressant plastic so I don't have to do any weeding for the whole of the season. Each winter I roll the plastic back, take out the very few perrenial weeds, add compost and roll it back. It helps to warm up the soil early in the year and retain moisture in hot weather. The plastic was quite cheap and has been down for about 8 years so far. It still seems as good as new.

 

Hi Quercus,

In general, that is good advice but doing it my way sometimes results in us eating fresh runner beans in early June and most times before the end of June.

I grow anything up to 400 runner bean plants and normally plant out 200. The other plants are sold for our charity and so are the spare beans that grow throughout the season. :thumb:

 

Hi Andrew,
We could quite easily eat a pound a day between the two of us :gnthb: (our favourite veg). At the height of the season I have at least 50lb a week to sell, at the clubs I go to, for our charity.


Vince,
I agree :thumb:. It makes good sense to take a chance on losing a few bean seeds and less than half an hour's time (potting and planting out) for the chance of having lovely fresh runner beans a few weeks early. Even in 2008 when it snowed heavily on the 6th April my beans were planted out before the end of the month and growing happily inside their plastic shelter.

By July 4th when I took this next picture We had been picking about three pounds of beans a week for three weeks. These were the early planted ones. They had almost finished fruiting by the second week in September but, as I planted out five other lots of beans in succession until early July, the later ones lasted until the frost at the end of October.

Photo taken 4th July 2008