Tomatoes & Beans galore!

Picked these tonight, having to give most away at the moment:


The bunch of beans at the back is a new variety called Moonlight. It's a cross between a runner bean and a french bean, it's supposed to have the great taste of a runner but doesn't need bees to pollinate it. However it has been very slow to harvest. This is our first picking (the main bunch is Enorma which we've been picking for over a month now). I'll let you all know what it tastes like soon

 

Good crop there, John and a nice variety of toms.

How are the Koralik doing in the greenhouse? Have they become too straggly in there? Ours are doing well outside but are much shorter and wider than usual but plenty of toms on them.

Our first sowing of beans have been producing well but after the damage by the slugs and rabbits we are down from 150 to 100 plants. All the beans we put on the wooden pyramids in the front garden got taken by snails - twice!! :wallbang: I think the snails found it much easier to climb them as they are made out of hazel instead of canes.

 

The Koralik is doing well, it is straggy and the stems are thin but it has lots of small sweet fruit, there are some in the photo above. I'm having problems with grey mould on most of my other plants but the Koralik isn't affected.

The oxheart tomato plant I got at your open day isn't doing that well, it's in the greenhouse too, the fruit are small and no-where near ripened yet.

Shame about your slug/rabbit damage. I've hardly been bothered by snails this year not quite sure why.

 

It might be cute:

 

You might like to hear what we thought of the Moonlight beans (which are a cross between French and Runners, main advantage being they don't need pollinating by Bees).

We ate the Moonlight beans tonight, with mixed responses from the family. I think they are stringy but I still liked the taste. Mrs JWK didn't like the taste or the stringyness. My son liked them and said they were sweeter than my normal runner beans.

I thought I'd try growing Moonlight since I'd had problems in the past with getting Runners to set. But this year my Enorma Runner Beans have been exceptionally productive and tasty. The Moonlight have been much slower to get going so I won't grow them again in the future.

 

Sorry Freddy thats all I know, and to be honest until I just googled, I hadn't realised that "Oxheart" isn't a single variety; it's a group of varieties with common characteristics. Maybe Shiney knows more?

 

Hi Freddy, I don't remember which vareity of Oxheart it was but it was definitely not that one - although it is just the Italian for Ox Heart.

We, also, had a problem with them going mouldy. With us, the mould seemed to start in the folds of the tomato and then spread. Although we didn't have a particularly good season for toms apart from the Koralik. The only other ones that did well (still got blight but produced a lot of toms before succumbing) were our Italian plum toms.