Tag Archives: Pea beans

August 2017 Growing Update

The first harvest of this year's winter squashes.

August has been a very enjoyable month for us. We’ve been merrily harvesting and weeding, and enjoying some lovely weather whilst we’ve been doing it. The month started with us away for the weekend camping, which naturally meant that it rained, and so our garden and allotment got a good watering. From then on the weather was a bit up and down, some wet and almost autumnal days, but some gloriously sunny days, including the hottest August bank holiday on record! Our biggest regret this month has been not getting more crops sowed, as we still have some unused space…

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July 2016 Growing Update

Martock Field Beans

Mature Martock field beans growing in our garden.

What a contrast July has been when compared to June! Almost every day this month has been warm and sunny with very little rain. It’s been a very busy month for us. We’ve transformed the allotment and the plants there are thriving in the warm weather. It has meant that we’ve had to spend a lot of time watering the plants this month, and even more time weeding. In the garden the legumes bed has been very productive. Our Martock field beans have produced such a crop that we’ve had a couple of plants bend in two under their own…

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Pea Beans

Pea beans

Some of home-grown pea beans. These are without a doubt our favourite bean that we have ever grown.

We’ve mentioned them several times in passing before, but today we are dedicating an entire post to what is undoubtedly our favourite bean that we have ever grown or eaten: the pea bean. We first started growing these five years ago, purely for their looks. But when we came to cook them we were won over – we’ve never gone a year without them since. Although older textbooks sometimes classify them otherwise, pea beans are now categorised as Phaseolus vulgaris: French or ‘kidney’ beans. Pea beans are climbing beans that produce white flowers followed by short pods. The pods start…

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2015 – The Year In Review

Just some of our homegrown produce from this year.

Just some of what we grew and produced this year. Top left - bottom right: winter squashes, parsnip, kohlrabi, a batch of jam, mushrooms, spiralised courgette ('courgetti'), plums, tomatoes and courgettes, squashes in our pumpkin patch.

This year was our first in our current home with our rather large garden. We moved into this house in May, and although we were late out with many of our crops, we’ve had a very successful growing season. In this post we’ll look back over the year and share where we feel we were successful, and where we were not. Soft Fruits By far our largest and most used soft fruit crop was our plums. We can’t really take much credit for this crop, as all of the trees were already here when we moved in, and we have…

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The Garden – A Quick Update

Squashes and courgettes in the pumpkin patch.

The area now prepared with a grand total of 7 squash, 5 courgette, 1 pumpkin and 1 patty pan plants all in position.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in the garden. Aside from the mammouth tasks of weeding, watering and generally tending to our plants that are already in their final positions, we’ve also planted a lot more out. Our most noteworthy achievement in the last fortnight is probably that we cleared the remainder of the pumpkin patch. We have now, for that whole square area that was lawn, removed all of the turf, turned the soil, forked in manure, made ridges for the plants, and planted out something into all but two of the positions. These final positions will be…

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