Cooking with runner bean beans

Howdy all, bit late but, happy 2016!

Life at the allotment has been quiet over the winter. Beside monitoring the red onions and garlic, which are growing well, there has been little for us to do. But with the days lengthening it's time to start getting back on the land.

The manure has been rotting into the ground, so that can be dug in soon, and there is some weeding to do to prepare the other beds.

One of the first jobs we need to do is prune and stake up the apple tree. There are a lot of low laying branches where we lost a lot of fruit last year so we need to see what we can do to straighten the little tree up a bit.

Job 2: Herb patch. Some of them have gone mad, the chamomile has spread to cover half the bed, the curry plant is more of a bush and there are a lot of weeds to get rid off.

Job 3: Potatoes can start to be planted out next month so we will need to get our seeding potatoes soon to chit and then plant out once there will be no more frost. I once overheard an old gent say that you should always get your potatoes in before Good Friday. So that's the plan.

Job 3: We need to plan what we want to grow this year and get the cold frame ready for seedlings.


The jobs will be endless so I will leave it there for now and update you with progress once we get going. We just need a dry weekend.


On a side note, we had a ridiculous amount of runner beans last year and we couldn't eat them all. So, the ones that grew too big we popped all of the beans out of their pods and froze them. You can see from my last post they are pretty pink beans. Well, we got them out this week and added them to a stew and they were damn tasty.

More giant veg

Things have been quiet at the allotment recently while veg has just been growing. Plus it's been a pretty wet few weeks.

But, today was harvest day. And very good it was too. The carrots finally came up. With a gentle tease of the folk up came some enormous carrots. There were a few ludicrously big and a few diddy ones.

We pulled up a few leeks and up-turned a monster of a potato. I did notice a few beastie holes in the potatoes so I think I need to read up on spud pests. Only one carrot had been attacked so that was ok.

And the best of the rest - The whole haul included: carrots, potatoes, a pumpkin, corn on the cob, leeks, tomatoes and lettuce.