Bye Bye Beans

Our benas have finished for this year and they gave us a really good season of prolific, extremely tasty, beans.

Thank you beans :gnthb:









I'm now clearing up their growing area. During the winter we shall roll back the membrane and dig compost in. Then roll the membrane back down again. We haven't needed to weed this area for seven years :thumb:.

 

Hi Kandy,
It gets burned as I already have more than enough green stuff to compost. We are quite fussy now about what goes on the compost heaps as the local council will take away garden rubbish. All the weeds go in the bin and anything that is too tough or hard to compost easily. We wheel the bin around the garden whilst we are working so all the weeds get dumped straight into it. We fill two wheelie bins each week, the compost heaps (three of them about 6' x 4' and 4' high) are kept topped up and we burn all the heavier or bulkier stuff regularly.

Aaron, as Alice says, lots of feed and water and you should find them to be very succesful. If you are able to get to us next open day I can keep some plants aside for you as they sell out quite quickly. It's not worth buying a packet of seed, usually 35+ per packet, if you don't need that many. :thumb:

Alice, I agree that beans seem to be the best crop per sq yard but, technically, it is bananas. :hehe:

 

Aaron, the plants are quite happy in partial shade as long as they have warmth and plenty of water. The sunshine is only important from the point of view of getting the bees to pollinate them.

French beans tend to be self-pollinating but only the newer varieties of runner beans are semi self-pollinating (some claim to be fully self-pollinating but I'm not so sure). If you have plenty of plants in the garden to attract the bees then there will never be a problem although some early flowers on the beans may occur before many bees are around. There are also some species of bee that find it difficult to get inside the flower so they pierce a hole through the base of the flower to get the nectar and the flower doesn't get pollinated. If you are really anxious to get a head start you can hand pollinate. Once the plants start producing beans they grow like mad :gnthb:.

 

Shiney that is some heap, didn't you do well.

Well done Ziggy, keeping them going this long.

 

I think we may have topped 500 lbs this year :yho:. We ate a lot, gave some away to people who could do with them and sold over 350 lb for our charity.

 

500 lbs of beans! I don't think I managed 5 lbs this year shiney, that is going some - well done.

Ziggy, you can't trust guildfordians you know.

 

John,
I think that one of the secrets is watering them at the right time. As we have so many plants I have to water them with a sprinkler and that is on for four hours at a time. They get this twice a week unless there has been very heavy rain.
If it has been very hot and dry they still only get watered twice a week but for six hours. Frequent but lesser waterings doesn't help them as it doesn't encourage the roots to go down deeper. Hand watering would require about one to two gallons per plant.

Kandy,
We start our seeds off in the greenhouse as we can't take the chance on not knowing whether they will come up in the garden. We don't bother much with hardening them off - too many to lug in and out of the greenhouse.
Usually we grow about 500 plants because a lot of people now buy them from us on open day. By that time (end of May) they wouldn't need hardening off but if you plant them early it would help them to be hardened off. Beans are pretty tough little b*ggers :D.
There was an enormous amount of blackfly this year but I hosed them down regularly. Any leaves that had loads of blackfly I just snipped off and put on the bonfire.