First job was to put up the canes for the Runner Beans. As usual I put in 7 pairs of 8-foot bamboo canes, pushed into the ground about a foot, leaving 7 feet of height for the beans to grow up:
The beans themselves are not quite big enough for planting out. Maybe a few more days...
This year the leaves of the bean plants ("Scarlet Empire") are very yellow. I don't know why. Something to do with the compost maybe? The plants seem strong enough; it's just that the leaves are a strange color.
The other variety of Runner Bean that I sowed - "Red Rum" - germinated very badly. So far I only have one viable plant of that type, from 12 sown. The seeds were old, I know, but not excessively so. I have put some more in, so we'll see what happens.
I have also planted out three cucumber plants ("Iznik F1"), but in view of the cold night-time temperatures we are still getting I have put them under cloches:
You might just be able to see that I have tied the plants (there are two in this big pot) loosely to short sticks - ones that fit under the cloche. When the weather warms up and I feel it is safe to remove the cloche I will put in a couple of tall canes for the plants to climb up.
I also decided to tie-in my Sweet Peas. The "rings of string" idea was short-lived, because the plants just flopped around. Since I only have a small number of plants, tying them in won't be a very big job. The first lot of Sweet Peas is looking very sickly (they are just visible around the edges of the pot in the photo below), whereas the second batch seems much stronger.
The ordinary peas are setting pods now, so it won't be long before I'm picking them:
In my garden April is a sowing month; May is a planting month; and June is the first of the harvesting months!
