Oh sugar.... the barrel or ground game

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I grow a lot of dwarf french beans, but these days only grow the fine (AJA fillet) varieties such as Safari and Ferrari. Mine are sown 2 or 3 seeds per small flexi pot or each cell of a 24 x insert tray. I find multi seed sowings produce a heavier crop for the area on plan, plus help ensures small diameter beans that can be cooked whole with the only preparation required being snipping the ends off with scissors.

This is 50 such flexi pots of Safari that were sown in propagators only 9 days ago, brought on under growlights and will go into a polytunnel tomorrow, then be hardened off (protected against leaf scorch) and planted out 14 days after sowing. All they cost were 99p/packet from Premier Seeds and some MPC. I'll put some more in shortly after planting those out.

I have planted them into pots (ex Morrisons flower buckets) for putting in polytunnels earlier than I would plant in open ground (can be placed amongst small cordon toms), but they do not crop as well, but don't know whether that's due to planting in containers or under cover. My last sowing will be to plant in those Morrisons pots placed around the base of polytunnel tomatoes when they get their lower leaves removed late in the season.

It's well worth growing a few extra plants to save seeds from.

 

I was thinking of the barrels as big pots which didn't do as well as open ground.

Not too late for another couple of sowings, I'll probably sow at least 2 more packets (of 130 seeds each). My saved seeds were getting a bit old, so my second sowing will be very soon so some of the first lot can go to seed and have sufficient time to ripen Dwarf French Bean Safari – Premier Seeds Direct

 

Peas don't take up much room as they grow verticaly. If there's nowhere else, I suppose some canes pushed in at the back of a row of barrels with some chicken wire or weldmesh would take up very little of the soil surface, wire mesh strung along the back of several barrels, or small curved individual pieces. French beans around the perimeter hanging slightly over the edge would help prevent muddy pods (I grow through Mypex).

If you've got any trailing squashes (if light enough) they could be grown in the same way to make the best use of space.

 

These are my squash plants (and french beans) that will have been sown for only 10 days by this afternoon, those beans will go out in a couple of days after aclimatising to outside conditions and my runners sown on same day are being planted out today with some fleece around the structure to protect against strong sunlight and wind as they already want to start climbing.

There's normally enough seeds in Premier's packets to try some this year and have plenty left for next year. It doesn't take long at this time of year to get stuff ready for planting. Seeds from PremierSeeds are only 99p, or slightly more from Amazon but with next day Prime delivery and even without a heated propagator it will be nice and warm up in the apex of a greenhouse this weekend.



P.S. Those small Gherkins at the front middle were only sown several days ago for a friend of Mrs Scrungee's who's sowing failed to germinate/cat got them or something like that.

 

Living in the north of the UK I have struggled to get a decent crop of courgettes outside in the veg garden so tend to grow them in the greenhouse. They take up a great deal of room and sprawl all over the place. I read that you can grow them up canes like you would perhaps Cucumbers and you can remove the lower leaves (without affecting the crop) so as not to take up so much space. I am going to try this this year in my greenhouse. If you liked courgettes you could maybe try growing them this way too, in your barrels, but living where you do you could be successful just having them outside. You might need a step ladder to pick them though as they grow quite tall this way I would imagine! It is getting a bit late to be sowing seed but Courgette seed usually germinates very fast in a nice warm spot on a windowsill so I think there would still be time to be successful.