Broad beans and the vegetable patch

My very small vegetable patch pre-manuring

I have managed, mainly through butchering a choisya, to carve out a small segment of the garden in a sunny patch for the growing of vegetables.  To say it is a 'vegetable patch' or garden, would be to award it more gravitas than it deserves, like calling a Brighton beach hut a holiday home.  Somehow the mother snuck a pair of alliums front and centre of the space, and one year I will finally get around to digging them up and relocating them elsewhere.  Not this year though.

One of the trenches with manure in.

Last year I neglected this special space for far too long, until a bountiful luscious bed of weeds had formed and I was de-weeding from left to right as necessary to be able to get my plants in! Not the way to do it.  This year, I promised myself I would be far more organised, and come rain or shine get out there in advance and get the soil sorted so nothing was left stranded in small pots becoming root bound while everybody waited for me to get my act together.  That obviously didn't happen.  I plucked out the odd weed here and there as I went past but the job remained firmly on my to do list.  Luckily this attitude actually paid dividens and the mother finally got fed up of seeing the weeds and instructed the father to pull them all out.  And he was able to be convinced to go and buy two bags of manure from a local farm.  Solid gold that man is, has no vision but great for the manual labour.

My first batch of broad beans growing big and juicy leaves

I did do some of the hard graft myself and set too with fork and spade to really work it over and add some manure in there to get things going.  Having used this patch as a veg bed for the last few years and done a lot to the soil it is quite a different beast to the rest of the garden where a pick-axe or automatic road drill are essential tools to hole-digging.  The method for adding manure, so the mother tells me, is to dig a trench along the back of the bed, spade in some delightfully rotted horse poo, and then cover it over with the soil in front, digging down far enough to create a second trench in front to take the next batch of manure.  In this way the whole bed is fertilised and the soil moved about.  That's the theory, problem is by the time I had finished I had managed to create rather an impressive hill.  The mother said she had never known anybody be able to create a hill on a completely flat piece of ground quite so effectively.  I have attempted to flatten it but essentially my veg are on a gradient.

Some solid roots

So patch all primed the first seedlings to be planted were my first batch of broad beans.  Now im not going to brag, but im rather pleased with how my broad beans are coming along.  I bought a new variety for this year called Witkiem (manita), why the manita is in brackets I don't know.  I felt panicked after checking back over last years blog posts to discover I had my broad beans up at the beginning of April, so chucked them in this year on the 14th March so as not to be behind.  They took their time and only started appearing on the 6th April, so almost exactly the same time as last year.  A total of thirteen out of fifteen came through. which is not too bad I thought.  I neglected to note down when I actually planted them out, but I believe it was around the 20th of April.

All neatly tucked into their new bed

Having got one set it I embarked upon a second batch, and ignoring such trivial things like sow-by-dates, sowed a tray of last years variety as well.  Im pleased to say the beans weren't bothered about not being in date either and I had a similar amount of Masterpiece Green Longpod germinate too.  These were growing great guns so I also got them in the patch this week.  I can't tell you how chuffed I am to be so organised and ahead of the game this year.  And I managed to defend every single bean's honour from slugs.  

They are all now about a foot tall and coming along nicely

Look how well they are coming along!  My first batch is over a foot tall now, and although they currently look fairly sturdy, this is what they looked like last year before collapsing all over the lawn.  So this year I am primed and ready to stake them at the first sign of weakness.  I also now know that broad beans require tonnes and tonnes of water when in flower so hopefully I should get a good crop.  I love growing broad beans because the seedlings are so satisfyingly lush.  I am out of space for broad beans now so im all set in terms of sowing for this year.

My second batch again bursting forth and needing planting out pronto!