Beans in the front garden - french, runner and dwarf

I am back.  The reasoning for a three week absence is I escaped to Cyprus for a ten day break from the stresses of being a journalist and my everyday life.  If I was a more organised person I would have written posts in advance and had them go up automatically while I was away, but I am not that person.  But now I am back, brown as a berry and refreshed and talking about beans.

The mother does not approve of me turning the front garden into a vegetable patch.  Luckily I don't  give two hoots what she thinks so have done so anyway.  You see, the reason I don't grow more vegetables than I already do is a question of space.  I have wedged in a small vegetable bed at the bottom of my back garden by removing shrubs, but there is only space for a small crop of broad beans, sugar snap and peas.  No room at all for more exotic legumes such as french beans or a cheeky line of dwarf.

In my minds eye when I was writing this I had taken lots of lovely pictures.  It turns out
I only took two, and neither are terribly visually interesting.  I dug three enormous holes
to put manure in, the effort that had to be put in does not come across.

I am a big believer in grabbing opportunity by both hands, and if that opportunity is a border of old shrubs, pulling until removed.  The shrubs did need to go.  Looking like a row of unkempt teeth, what had been a delightfully ordered set of various bushes had grown and morphed into quite frankly what can only be described as a monstrosity.  Several years I have tried to convince the parents to let the bushes go, and only when the tall end one started to die and one in the middle sagged onto the lawn did they finally relent.

Being ever keen to save things the mother chopped down the euonymus and berberis in the hope they would re-sprout.  Then they called in a professional gardener to pull out the stumps of the other two.  Only said professional gardener got a little carried away and pulled out the whole lot.  I practically died of amusement when I came home to find a barren front border devoid of any plant-life.  This quickly moved to salivating over what could be put there instead.

Luckily the mother saw this mishap as an opportunity rather than a disaster, an opportunity to start afresh. Admittedly fresh with shrubs was her thought but I had other ideas.  Beans.  To be fair, now is not the time to be planting new shrubs and she has no idea what she wants to put in there so in the mean time I have whipped in several circles of beans.

I had to go shop bought rather than home-grown as I was not expecting this soil windfall and so hadn't prepared.  Instead I bought two packs of the french bean variety Blue Lake.  The garden centre actually had a very limited choice, I was expecting beans of every shape and colour, but no, so I couldn't mix it up a bit.  On another trip to a different one I did stumble across some dwarf beans which are handy because they are vertically challenged members of the bean world and don't require staking.

The mother's runners.  She had a really healthy luscious crop that have grown like weeds since going in.  She knows how to go for numbers, think we will have runners galore

The mother has benefitted as well mind you.  She always likes to grow some runner beans.  Last year she planted them in a small space at the front of a boarder in the back garden and they ended up growing through the apple tree which didn't make picking easy.  Pretty though.  With all this new space she was able to plant out her runners in a nice roomy circle ready for a wigwam.  Picking should be a dream.  It hasn't been without its work though because the entire thing has had to be dug over to remove small roots and copious amounts of horse poo has been shoveled in, although I read afterwards that beans don't like freshly manured grounds, but tough, they've got it now.

So currently there are three circles of climbing beans and three small lines of dwarf beans in the front garden.  I plan to add to this with some broccoli in the near future.  The mother keeps talking about putting bushes back in. but its not happening.  Now I have my hands on this earth im not letting go.  The only problem is its a little exposed to my neighbours and I can not garden in my night frock out there as is my want sometimes.  Better than nothing though.