Pig Sty Avenue

A few of them were a little rotted, and the air turned blue as I vented my feelings on appearance of onion white rot. But a closer examination suggested the rot was at the base of the stalk, the top of the bulb, and NOT around the roots. So, it was just some rot, perhaps caused by rainwater lying too long on the surface. I lost maybe 7-9 bulbs that way. The carcassonne wight are still growing. Anyway you look at it, we've got enough garlic for the next year.

The last blog post was also all about the Vicia faba, winter field beans. They dominate the plot more than somewhat, being now 7ft high and occupying the 4th bed. Many of them are flopping over. So I decided I'd have a go at harvesting them. After an hour and a half, I had two barrows-full of stalks, and a plastic loaf tray (a bit less than 1/2 metre sq.) full of pods. All of this from just a couple of square metres in the bed - I cleared the end of the bed, near the pond, where the beans had flopped over and covered the skinny path. I'm thinking, how the hell am I going to get these seeds dry?  And, what an awful lot of beans I'm going to have. The answer to the drying problem: leave the bloomin' beans o n the plant until they dry out, (according to realseeds.co.uk) . I'm just going to have to get over the fact that the 4th bed is now looking like a jungle. The thing to take away is, a patch of, say, 50sq ft sown in September, will yield enough beans 10-12 mon...

That's the end of the 5th bed, which of course adjoins the 4th bed, which I planted out with winter field beans last autumn . The plan then was to hoe them down in spring, and either compost or leave the foliage as mulch. But I decided to leave them be when it became clear that riddling out the 5th bed was going to take up most of this growing season. The other thing about them is that the beans are quite bulky and heavy, as seed, so not cheap to buy online in quantity. My plan for this autumn is to sow them throughout the plot (except for the 4th bed, where they are now, of course).  The plants are now pushing up to 6ft high, and are growing closely together - 2-3 ins apart. They had a lot of chocolate spot in early spring, but that's confined to the lower foliage, the upper is untouched by it. It's a jungle, 12x24ft (approx), and there's no doubt a lot of invertebrate life going on there, with quite a frog presence too. I can say that bumblebees love the flower...