crops

The mystery of the disappearing runner bean flowers

Growing runner beans looks easy, but it has its pitfalls. After harvesting a nice handful of runner beans last week, they seem to have hit a bit of a brick wall – not least because a lot of the flowers have disappeared! (See pic below.) Either this is due to the high winds we’ve been having in the last few days, or some insect/slug entity has decided to put my runner bean flowers on its personal menu. I’m told by Someone Who Knows that my beans will undergo a second flowering and that I should therefore get a nice crop in September, with any luck. Hope so, because runner beans are my favourite vegetable apart from courgettes and asparagus and I would hate to think that I built my bean wigwam in vain LOL.

Really easy salad leaves

Well, after three good courgettes, we’re back to the tiny ones with blossom end rot. Maybe that’s the way of things with courgettes – you get a few good ones, then about twice as many rubbish ones, then a few good ones again… I am going to pound up some chalk in their water and see if that makes a difference (the chalk being a source of calcium, which is one of the possible reasons I found for the blossom end rot – see earlier post). Anyway, this post isn’t really about my tiny limp courgettes, it’s about a major success story, pictured below. I bought a 39p packet of mixed leaf lettuce seeds from my local Aldi supermarket back in March, planted them in April and from May onwards, I was harvesting cut and come again salad leaves. I still am in fact, in the middle of July – and they show no sign of slowing down or bolting. (Apart from one of the leaf varieties, which is a sort of spicy mustard type thing. They bolt like anything once the temperature goes up a notch.) I will be planting another lot of mixed leaf lettuce in early August, and am going to have another go at growing mizuna then as well, which was spectacularly unsuccessful the first time I tried it due to the fact that the local snail population treated it as their friendly neighbourhood restaurant.

Our first tomatoes

You know that summer’s finally here when the first tiny green tomatoes appear on your plants. (Well, actually down here in our corner of the UK we already knew that summer was here, due to the unrelenting sun beating down with a ferocity that’s more appropriate for Greece or Spain than Britain.) With twelve Gardener’s Delight plants and another ten Tumbling Tom hanging basket tomatoes this year, we should be OK for tomatoes this late summer/autumn, unless the blight gets them of course! Last year was my first attempt at growing tomatoes in containers, and it was a great success – mainly due I think to the ol’ home-made compost and regular feeding with comfrey fertiliser. Next year I’d like to be a bit more adventurous, and try growing heirloom varieties and yellow or black tomatoes. In case you were wondering, those purple flowers just visible at the bottom of the picture are oregano. With regular pinching of the leaves at the top of each stem, I’ve managed to get a nice bushy oregano plant this year. Oregano is a lovely herb to have in your garden if like me you enjoy making tomato-based sauces to go with pasta!

Courgette blossom end rot: the sequel

I think I’ve cracked it! As this picture demonstrates, I hope. Actually there were two courgettes of this size, but the other one has already been eaten (it went into a tomato sauce to accompany some spinach and ricotta tortellini). Since taking this photo, I’ve picked the remaining one and as I write, my other half is cooking a chilli con carne containing… chopped courgette. So in answer to the “what causes blossom end rot in courgettes?” question I posed earlier, the two possible answers seem to be “cold weather” and/or “a too-damp environment”. Because as you can see, this courgette has had the chance to mature in wafts of nice fresh air as it dangles over the edge of the container, as opposed to being forced to grow up (as it were) in a more confined space.

Blossom end rot!

I don’t think I’ve quite got the hang of courgettes just yet. Last year I grew a couple of them in the same large container, using shop-bought compost. I did harvest two decent sized fruit, but of the three or four other fruit that I noticed, all of them reached about 3 inches long and then started to shrivel away from the flower end. Rather like the ones in the picture, in fact – these are taken from one of the courgette plants I’m growing this year. However, I am managing a greater number of “viable” courgettes – four or five so far, off the one plant. Trouble is, I’m reluctant to just let them grow in case they too start rotting, so I pick them when they reach 4 inches long.

After doing some research on various Internet forums etc., there seem to be several reasons why blossom end rot can occur:

1. Inadequate pollination
2. Water getting into the flower and rotting the fruit
3. Too cold
4. Lack of calcium.

Not sure if inadequate pollination is the right answer – surely my courgettes wouldn’t even reach a length of 2-3 inches if that were the case? I can definitely see the logic behind (2), but I’ve tried removing some flowers as an experiment and the courgettes in question STILL succumb. I’m wondering if flower removal is enough – perhaps the problem is caused by a damp atmosphere inside the container, which could certainly be the case because the plant is in a very deep bucket, which I’ve only filled half way. Perhaps the flowering stalks of a courgette plant need to have access to regular wafts of fresh air.

“Too cold” – well, that isn’t a problem any more. We’re right in the middle of a heatwave at the moment. And as for the lack of calcium: that could be an idea. I planted this particular courgette in pure compost with no garden soil at all, so maybe it just needs a bit of lime. Looks like a trip down to the beach to pick up a few bits of chalk then!

Eats, shoots and peas

Last year I tried to grow mange-tout peas in one of our raised beds and it was a complete washout. There really wasn’t enough room to grow the number of plants needed for a decent crop of peas, and the dreaded snails had their fill of the tender leaves before they really had a chance to get established. From half a dozen plants, I must have managed to harvest twelve or so mange-touts.

Then this year, I had a lightbulb moment – thanks to watching Alys Fowler in her BBC TV series The Edible Garden. She suggested growing pea plants for their shoots, rather than for peas. Plant peas close together in a container (six inches of compost is plenty), then put them in a reasonably snail-free environment. When the plants are a few inches high, just cut off the tops, from the tendrils down to below the first set of leaves below them. Eat cold in salads. Yum, yum.