Taking on an allotment

A lot can be achieved in a garden, especially when the local handyman can be convinced to 'accidentally' remove your mother's line of prized bushes, leaving a nice bit of land to grow more cosmos than one person really needs and a steady supply of summer beans.

But a garden has its limitations. With the best will in the world, you cannot ram a squash plant in amongst your mother's rose bushes and expect good results. And I know you can grow all sorts of vegetables in containers, but its a lot of watering.

I didn't blog much last year for many reasons, one of which being that there is only so many ways to put tulips in a pot and I felt a little uninspired. That and planting more than a hundred cosmos plants is incredibly time consuming.

This year has seen many changes, including changing jobs and moving house - a very stressful combination I have discovered. The most exciting change by far though (no offence to the boyfriend I have moved in with) is the acquisition of my very first allotment.

With 112.5m of prime Surrey real estate at my disposal the opportunities are endless. This new venture has inspired me to get back to blogging and share my tales from the allotment.

Here it is back in March when I had but a fork and a weed to my name

I have had the plot for a few months now and things are progressing well. I have already learnt a lot, including that my plot's previous tenant had a series thing for horseradish judging by the amount he left behind.

Continuing the spirit of change, this will be my last blog on Basically its Growing. I have made a fresh start here at The Beanyfiend. Join me for surprisingly juicy tales from the allotment, and I'm not talking about the fruit!

Dwarf beans - productive and tasty, the perfect bean!

A killer on the back but well worth the effort.  Luckily Im young and resilient

I wish dwarf beans had come into my life earlier.  There is nothing not to like; quick to produce, economical on space needs, no wigwam construction required.  Perfect.  Although I will admit that they will do your back in when it comes to picking, but so will the bottom tiers of a wigwam, so thats totally forgivable.

The electric purple flowers, obviously not very big and in-your-face
but nobody is going to say no to a little dot of colour here and there

I would like to say that I saw these beans through from sowing to harvest, but I cheated and bought these as seedlings.  In my defence it was like mid May when the garden space opened up, and always better to cheat and make use of the opportunity than stick to principles and not.  I bought dwarf french beans and the best thing about them, other than the fact that they have produced a veritable hoard of beans, is that the flowers were purple.  A pretty bean is always a bonus in my book.  It was a really nice purple as well, very very pale but quite electric at the same time.  It sung out, one might say, above a sea of green leaves.  The popped into flower around early July, and were out of it and into bean production before I could turn round.

Beans forming on the plant

Im totally sold on french beans, stuff broad beans with their months of development only to find the tiniest beans ever snuggled in those fluffy casings.  Dwarf beans produce and they produce fast.  No sooner had I spotted a few thin beans beginning to form, than a quick rootle in the undergrowth revealed fully formed beans.  How they grow so quick is beyond me, but I like these short turnaround times.  Im all about an investment of time, but lets get some edible results!  They were by far the earliest out of all my french and runner beans this year, and while the others are just getting going I am sadly beginning to near the end of the dwarf crop.

The beans in question

Not only do they produce fast, but they produce a lot.  They require picking every couple of days and my fridge has been stuffed out for a couple of weeks with them now.  We have had several meals off them, and if there wasn't currently four adults living at home, im sure I could have exclusively lived off them for vegetables for several weeks.  Considering how few plants I have, I think this is really impressive.  And very satisfying!  At last a vegetable that has performed just as it should and given bountiful reward.

Nothing better than a good bean pick on a sunny day.  Less so like it was tonight - hammering down with rain

Obviously volume is always welcome, but they also need to taste good as well, and these really do.  We tend to top and tail them, cut them into two centimetre sections and steam them, although they also got thrown into a stirfry the other night as well. Delicious.  Obviously it helps to pick them before they get old and touch, which I try my best at, but try as one might you always come across a huge old fat bean and think, how, how did did I miss you?!  As clear as the nose on my face.

Some of the beans early on, they are good and tasty, and as long as they are picked early enough, tender too

Dwarf beans will definitely be featuring in my garden again next year.  They are just such a handy productive bean.  In fact two varieties for next year are already in my possession.  I bought a packet of purple queen, which is unsurprisingly purple, and ferrari which is your standard fillet type green bean.  I have also seen a strange yellow one which grows in containers which I wouldn't be sad to have in my possession.

We had some in a nice stir-fry, it added a bit of green to the mix, but normally we just steam them

A border of summer annuals - July

My new annual flower bed, with cosmos, stocks, cornflowers and my first zinnia
of the season

You know what they say, one person's loss is another's gain.  In this case it is four bushes lost, a summer annuals border gain.  I have posted before about how we ripped out the front hedge consisting of four raggedy bushes and were left with a lovely big border just ripe for the planting.  I put in three wigwams of beans and a couple of lines of dwarf but this still left me with plenty of room for other things.  And if that wasn't enough the mother then decided to cut into the grass and expand the border to make something a little more pleasing on the eye.

One of my beautiful marbled antirrhinums, nestled in next to my runner beans 

If you are a long-time reader of my blog, you would be aware that since January I have in effect been running an annuals breeding programme.  On cold cold Saturdays I would be huddled in my garage, pushing seed after seed into compost, dreaming of a beautiful summer display.  As this started pre front border emptying I figured I would just find holes for all these annuals here and there amongst the established plants.  That plan would not have worked.  I probably have grown around sixty plants of various varieties, my supply of nooks and crannies is not that endless.  They would have been tucked away and hidden.

It really has the feeling of a proper cottage garden, with a mixture of vegetables and
proper old fashioned cottage garden flowers.  Here is glorious bright red runner
bean flowers with white stocks

But not now.  Now they have taken centre stage in my garden, in full view of the road and all my neighbours, and I think it looks rather good.  Plants I managed to get in fairly early are happily flowering away.  At the other end my beans are also in flower surrounded by more annuals and then I have just put in my last plants in between.  There are also around fifty gladiolus bulbs in this border, when it is all out it should really be a joy to behold.  The first two spikes of gladiolus have just shot up so I am expecting flowers very shortly.

My border is full of these lovely dark burgundy cornflowers

Why did I grow all my annuals in pots rather than just chucking the seed in where they are to grow? Not in my soil they don't!  Nothing but aquilegia grows from seed in my heavy clay soil.  The task is too hard.  They do much better if they can be allowed to get established and then I leave them to the mercy of the clay.  I have given each plant a little sand around them to help improve drainage, and they seem to like it enough.  The great thing about this bit of soil is that because it had large bushes in it with extensive root systems, the soil is not too compacted and digging a few inches down is comparatively easy.

I am thrilled with this zinnia, its just the most beautiful colour.  I have several varieties
so there should be a good mix

Among my varieties are cosmos, zinnias, cornflowers, antirrinum, scabious and stocks.  I did not deliberately co-ordinate the colours but they do actually all compliment each other.  I will be doing individual posts on each variety, saying what I think of it and close-up pictures, that kind of thing, but I wanted to show the border as a whole as it is at the moment.  It is pretty today, but I hope it will change and morph across the next month and look different but equally pretty in a months time.  I will share how it has changed over the next month at the end of August.

Broad bean harvest - tiddly beans

Some of my first batch of broad beans, big juicy pods, disappointing insides

Look at my haul of lovely big juicy broad bean pods.  I am thrilled with their size and quantity.  I have bean pod growing completely figured out, I can grow exceptional bean pods.  I just need to figure out how to grow the beans themselves.  Unfortunately the beans within were on the whole a little underwhelming in size, if there were any snuggled in the furry lining at all.  Maybe I picked them a bit quick or didn't give them enough water.  But although few and far between, the beans I did get were tasty, no complaints there, but just not enough.

I have no complaints on the look of these beans, they are picture perfect.  As long as there are no expectations of a big meal afterwards

Although I grew more plants last year, I think I actually picked less beans because I was unaware of the bean's never ending desire for water and so the beans formed but never really got anywhere.  This was disappointing.  This year far more have come to fruition, if only underwhelmingly so, but the main thing I would change is to sow more plants.  I went for successive batches to try and stretch out the season but it meant that not enough were ready at the one time.  It would have been nice to have enough for more than just one meal, gathered over quite a while. Yes just the one, although it was for four people.  And a few that we just ate like an aperitif.  Hopefully if I do dig up some of the lawn next year this will be possible.  I only had about 12-15 plants in each of my batches, with at least one taken out by the father's excessively wild strimming, the man is wild with that thing.

One of the real changes I made to my growing technique this year, other than giving them a huge can-full of water every day, was to nip out the top of each plant.  I did this when the first bean had set at the bottom.  This is supposed to help a restricted amount of beans reach a decent size, rather than a lot be small. Or non-existent.  I think this worked up to a certain level, but like I said, beans were small and far from plentiful.  It is also meant to cut down on black fly due to the fact that they sort of begin out in the growing tip and spread to the rest of the plant.  I don't know why this is the case but it definitely is, I kept checking and sure enough after a while there the little devils were.  The technique kept them mainly at bay, except for one plant in my second crop that became infested overnight and despite picking a fair few off by hand, the plant was lost to their little clutches.

I made a little rice and bean salad with my first crop, there are obviously some sugar snap peas in there as well 

I was hanging on and giving daily drenches with the hosepipe in the hope I could encourage the last few beans to greatness, but this week I finally gave up.  Turns out it was a fruitless wait, most of the pods didn't even have beans forming inside.  The plants were being overtaken with rust and were looking shocking tatty, so I have pulled the whole lot out.  Its time to move on and get something else planted in there.

One hell of a mess.  A vegetable patch is always a strange kind of beauty
but this is well past visually appealing.  The whole lot just needed ripping
out

Considering the effort it takes to get out there and plant the seeds when its cold, manure the ground, dig it over, and continually water, Im not sure the results are really worth it.  Considering the vegetables you can grow, and the slightly more bountiful crops that can be achieved, I feel inclined not to bother with broad beans again. But I have already bought seeds for next year so for next season at least they will be back.

My second and vastly more disappointing of my two crops.  This is literally it.  Just one bean made it into a skin, not that you want them too because skins are tough.  Definitely next year I will just sow more plants at once.

Building wigwams for runner and french beans

I think you will agree, these are three solidly looking wigwams.  I forgot to photograph the wigwams on construction,
so this is a few weeks later, the beans have made rapid progress.  This also demonstrates the closeness of the beans to the neighbours

When one turns the front garden into an impromptu vegetable bed, one also has to construct wigwams.  I have never constructed a wigwam before.  Theoretically I believe the correct practise is to build your wigwam and then plant the beans around, but that would require the canes to be in ones possession when one plants the beans, which I did not have.  This is the problem with trying something new in the garden, it always results in having to invest in more equipment. I have sticks for broad beans, sticks for peas, sticks for sweat peas, but nothing longer.  And I needed a bit of length here.  So off to the garden centre I went, mother in tow.

Unfortunately I hit the garden centre after the locusts had already been through, buying every cane below eight foot and above five. After deciding that eight foot sticks would not fit into my car without some serious alteration on their part, however I attempted to wedge them in, we had to leave for another.  Typically this did not have cane supply problems, with every size imaginable covered.
We settled on seven foot canes as the appropriate length, but even these had to be wedged into the glove compartment on the passenger side, pass right under the mother's ear to be wedged right in the back of the boot. Getting them home was just stage one.  Now I had to set too and lasso them together.  I did not think this would be a difficult task.  I tried my best, but apparently wigwam making is harder than it looks, or at least it is if your making them to the mother's standards.

Being the daughter of the vegetable growing god that was my grandfather, I asked her to take a supervisory role.  Accordingly she vanished and I found her drinking tea and snacking on biscuits indoors, by which point I had one of my wigwams in place and was just going to lasso a whole load of twine around the top.  Despite opting out earlier, she declared I had done it all wrong and my wigwam would not withstand gale force winds.  Why she is expecting such gusts I don't know, we don't live in a terribly windy place.  So I told her if she thought it could be done better, feel free.  So the mother had to take to the soil and start making some reef knots.

I think the mother thinks the bamboo canes are the next Houdini.  Nobody is getting free
from this lassoing

She didn't like this for two reasons.  One, she was in her good skirt.  Two, she had until now believed she could act like a front garden full of beans had been thrust upon her rather than she was taking an active role.  No more.  Also her tea went cold, but that's by the by.  Anyway shes much taller than I and therefore far more suited to wigwam making.  She did a fine job, although complained incessantly.  It will probably take several hours to prize them apart at the end of the season the level of lasso she went into.

She says it suddenly looks like we have instantaneous beans because as they had been in a few weeks they had been putting on a bit of length, albeit along the ground.  While she was up-top in construction, I was coiling the beans up the poles.  I think it looks really pretty, very cottagey garden.  The parents were concerned it would be very vegetable patch, but beans have flowers and a whimsical air.  Not like im out there growing cabbages, not yet anyway.  It must look good because my neighbour told the mother while I was on holiday how much she liked the new front border, saying there was always something new to see.  I just love being proven right.

On the plus side if anybody had a mind to knick the canes, they would end up
giving up.  I dread trying to get them apart.  On a brighter note I love a good bean stalk coil
up a pole, its just so pleasing

So hopefully the wigwams will withstand the British hurricane season, having returned from holiday I can confirm they are all still very much in situ, and hopefully I will get a fine crop.  I am however concerned that passers by may feel inclined to pinch a bean or two on their way past.  I may have to erect signage and tell that neighbour to stop eyeing up my beans.   

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.