Allotment planting: broad beans

Yesterday was broad bean day. We’ve had broad beans overwintering on 235 and the seem to be doing okay, but there were many more ready to go into the ground and we’d seen the distinctive black and white flowers on many a plot during the previous week, so we felt that we should be getting ours sorted out too. Most broad beans are quite sturdy, but in windy Sussex they still need some support, so Himself got on with creating that, while I dug up the area that will become our brassica cage. It was horrible work, at exactly the wrong time of year, the soil is still cold and yet the perennial weeds have got away wonderfully, so that it was a combination of deeply compressed earth, tussocky grass and horrible root systems that had to be dug out.

I mention this so that you understand that while Himself was making pretty things, I was doing the ugly, unnoticed labour that later allows pretty things to be made – I don’t want you to think I was swanning around drinking tea and talking to the neighbours while he toiled away.

So eventually, bean supports!

Because of the mouse, shrew, rat problem (we’ve seen them all in the past year) we start all our peas and beans in pots and don’t plant them out until we’re sure the plant has grown enough to have completely absorbed the legume from which it grew – it’s those legumes that are so attractive to rodents that they dig up the plant (or seed) to eat it. Once the plant has taken the stored nourishment from that pea or bean, which is really an embryo, the plant doesn’t have the same attractiveness for rodents. I don’t know if they can actually smell the seed in the ground, but it seems to me that they can.

Our autumn-sown Aquadulce Claudia went into the ground on 235 in October, and have suddenly shot up, as they always do in spring. It’s often not necessary to pinch out the tops of autumn-sown broad beans as for some reason they don’t have the same blackfly problem as spring-sown ones, possibly because the overwintered leaves are very much tougher than the tender spring growth.

Labels: allotment-blackfly, allotment-broad-beans, allotment-perennial-weeds, allotment-rodents, aquadulce claudia

January Allotment Tasks

While a lot of people seem to think there’s nothing to be done on the allotment over the winter, they couldn’t be more wrong!

To start with, from 235 at least, there’s harvesting: our weekend lunch included the last of the fennel and the first of the purple sprouting broccoli. Wonderful food, as fresh as possible and when you look at supermarket prices for broccoli right now, we’re eating pure luxury.

And on 201, there’s always clearing up – and burning stuff!




I love burning stuff, and now we have a proper garden incinerator, we also have a way to generate lovely wood ash so that we can sprinkle it around seedling plants to keep the slugs off. You can buy incinerators, or convert an old metal dustbin by knocking holes in the lower sides with a cold chisel to allow oxygen flow which gives a faster burn. We’ve been getting rid of perennial weeds, hedge trimmings, and lots of brambles that were creeping into our plot from over the fence.

Labels: allotment-broccoli, allotment-fennel, allotment-incinerator, allotment-perennial-weeds, january-allotment-tasks