We made the most of a decent weekend weatherwise clearing beds and planting on the allotment. Saturday was the better of the two days with more sunshine although the temperature for both days was around the 18°C (65°F) mark which is about average for late May.
We needed to plant out our runner bean and climbing French bean plants before they outgrew their containers. The longest job though is erecting some supports for the beans to grow up. The weed control fabric is in its third year of use for runner beans and this was already in place with the slits cut in it ready for the beans to be planted through.
 |
| Runner Beans St George Celebration & Lady Di. Climbing French Beans Cosse Violette, Cobra & Corona d'Oro |
It's important to make the frames secure otherwise high winds in summer will blow the beans over resulting in a loss of the crop. We use bamboo canes as supports as we haven't managed to work out a better natural source as supports.
Our peas, Onward, and sweet peas crops were also in need of support. We use hazel twigs for this and I've been amazed how well they seem to work. I used to use some sort of stakes and netting either a metal mesh or plastic mesh specifically for supporting peas. Neither worked as well or looked as good as the hazel twigs.
 |
| Sweet Peas |
 |
| Peas Onward |
Our main problem at the moment is that weevils are munching away at the peas and we're just having to hope that the peas will grow through the attack. We are hoping that we manage to keep the slug damage on the beans to a minimum as last year the newly planted beans were devastated by slugs and although the beans survived our crop was much later than normal.
Posts
That's very nicely arranged stalked! I have learn something about staking from you! ;)
ReplyDelete