Newly-planted beans

It’s a year since we first started to grow our own food in the plot, and so we’re finding ourselves repeating some of the things we did around about now 12 months ago. This time we have more idea of what we should and shouldn’t be doing, which I hope will be reflected in the weight of the crops we produce.

And so in the last few days we have been busy starting off the beans and tomatoes.

As last year, we are growing three different types of tomato: gardeners’ delight, moneymaker and golden sunrise. All are easy to grow and generally crop well as they have been carefully bred and cross-bred over time to produce a more refined variant. Moneymaker is the most conventional. It’s a medium-size, juicy tomato of the type you might buy in a pack of six from a supermarket. This, and golden sunrise, which is a sweet yellow variety delicious in sandwiches, formed the bulk of our tomato chutney ingredients.

The final variety - gardeners’ delight - are cherry tomatoes, absolutely bursting with flavour and great in salads.

We’ve started them all off in an unheated propagator in the greenhouse to keep them cosy in the first few unpredictable weeks of spring. This has two vents, one of which we’ve closed, and the other left open. We’ll be giving it a good squirt of water from a water spray every couple of days.

At the same time we’re expanding on the beans we grew last year. Back then we only did runner beans and French beans, all of which were grown in pots as we didn’t have the plot ready in time. They suffered as a result, for while the crop was generally good while it lasted, it didn’t run for as long as those grown in the ground in the allotments over the back fence.

So this year we’ve planted the same runner and French beans and added broad beans to the mix, and although we’re starting them off in pots (see the picture above) we plan on moving them into the plot proper once the frosts have definitely finished and the shoots are big enough to handle. With some sun, rain, sufficient support and a little good fortune we’re hoping that between them all they’ll produce enough to see us through the summer, with plenty left over to freeze for winter consumption.