The last of the broad beans

Almost ready broad bean pods on the plant

I love broad beans - just picked, juicy broad beans, lightly steamed with some butter, salt and pepper --Mmmm

I grow as much as I can every year. 

They are a long term crop, I sow in October and watch them carefully in the spring. Growing broad bean shoots are the first signs that the soil is warm enough to plant seeds. They are out of the ground like rockets in the first hint of warm spring weather. 

Overwintered broad beans April 2012

Bold and strong, broad beans are a real Super-crop. They grow in symbiosis with a fungi that fixes nitrogen for them arround deep penetrating roots. They leave the soil  open and light and full of nitrogen, more fertile than before they grew. 

Usually easy to grow and relatively pest free, I would recommend them to anyone wanting to start a veg garden.

Fully grown broad bean plants over 4 foot high early June 2013

This last growing season was different. Instead of summer warmed October soil, the seeds went into the coldest and wettest autumn soil I can ever remember. It continued to rain. Most seeds rotted in the ground, so I planted more. Those that did germinate before the winter freeze rotted in the ground and in March my beds had just 10 plants.

I planted again. In the late cold spring I waited - nothing. So in April I seeded pots on my window sill at home. Then transferred them into the greenhouse as soon as the tips showed. As last desperate attempt, I planted 50 bean plants in the 3rd week in April in a late and wet spring.

The biggest bean plant - just taller than me at  5 foot 5 inches!

Amazingly they caught up! One month later than normal I am just pulling the spent plants out of the ground and planting cauliflower and broccoli. 

Two empty broad bean beds

The last of the broad beans pulled from the stalks just before they go in the compost. Yum!

The last of the broad beans till next year

Giant Garlic

I grow giant garlic - these were my best bulbs from last years crop. I saved them to plant this year and yes, that's my foot! Useually five to seven cloves to a bulb and Oh! each clove as large as my big toe.

White soft neck garlic and Karen's foot

I started to grow this type of garlic because it's great to cook with. I'm a lazy cook and these are the perfect size and strengh for me to be able to use one clove at a time. The big, mild and sweet cloves peel really easy and keep well. Much less work in the kitchen and I'm still useing my store from last year.

This photo is the biggest and best of last years bulbs, I split these into single cloves and planted them in October for this years crop which will be coming out of the ground later this month.

I love them. In the garden they are strong bold plants that look similar to leeks (same family) and always look good in the garden in early spring when everything else is dormant. Totally trouble free and once in the ground, almost no work at all.

Soft neck garlic flowers

This year I'm trying an experiment. Its common practise to take off the flowers when they form. The word is that removing the flowers gives a bigger crop. I'm testing this - I've kept the flowers on a few of the plants to see if  flowering really does effects the bulb size.

I'm interested to find out. The three plants I've left with the flowers are still growing, when all the others are dieing back as is normal this time of year. I would usually be pulling them up on a hot day later this month.

The flower colour is a sort of soft pinky white - nothing special, but at four foot high the colour isn't really the point and the bees love them! I'm hoping there not much difference in bulb size - I'd love to have the flowers. 35 of these four foot pompoms all together in a bed would be a fantastic sight.

One of the flowering garlic

Soft neck garlic is really easy to grow in the South West England climate and gives a good crop even when we have a wet summer. I always grow far more than I can ever use and give some as Christmas presents every year - everyone loves them!

A garlic twist ready to hang in the greenhouse to dry

Broccoli for dinner

Broccoli heads - from one plant

Yummy look at these lovely heads of broccoli, the first I've taken from my garden this year.
Its July.
I'm glad I can buy vegetables otherwise I would have starved this year - I'm normally eating something from the cabbage family all year round.
This broccoli bed is doing well after a very slow start - so its broccoli every day now until they are all gone. Then I'll be swapping stuff with my fellow growers until my next batch mature.

18 plants of broccoli

Here they are - all crammed in together, 18 plants in four rows.
I love that fantastic blue green colour!
Broccoli are very easy to grow once they get going. They do need a bit of careful babying when they are young to protect them from slugs and netting to stop the birds pecking them. Its well worth that little effort. Fresh home grown, steamed broccoli is one of my favourite vegetables.

The west corner of the garden 

They are in the west corner of garden. They are very easy to grow close together and as long as the soil is reasonably fertile they are very happy plants with a fantastic presence.
Mine are not growing in full sun,  I have a few trees around the garden. The sun reaches them after 9am and is gone before 3pm.
They do like a firm soil, so I try to plant them straight after beans. I cut the spent beans off at the base and leave the roots in the soil. I make holes for the broccoli with a bulb planter and mulch them with composted stable manure to suppress weeds and give the soil a bit of a boost - they are hungry plants.

A garden head ache with an old fashioned solution............

I buy myself a treat

50 summer flowering bulbs, an impulse buy at the supermarket checkout – £5. Great price and know I'm going to love them when they flower.

My treat becomes a trauma

The box says plant now, but where are the empty spaces in my garden? I wonder 

around looking at suitable sunny spots but I can’t remember. Instead of garden eye candy, these bulbs are giving me a garden head ache! 

I look at photos of my garden. It should be easy to spot gaps in the planting.
I'm always taking photos of my garden with my phone, or my compact camera, and when there's something special - on my SLR. so there are plenty to look at.

Finding photos of the garden doesn’t cure my headache, it just creates a bigger one.

There's photos on my phone, on memory cards, on face book, my laptop and the old computer I don’t use much any more. 

Then there's thousands on a portable hard drive, more on Picasa and some on flickr. I've tweeted some, I've emailed some, I've texted others and a few have got pinned.

So how do I 

• compare photos on my phone with ones on my computer?
• compare photos in different folders?
• look at more than four at a time big enough to see the details?
• compare spring photos with summer photos?
• remember when I get into the garden!

My low tec solution

Old fashioned photos and sticky corners! Yes I'm printing my garden photos and sticking them in a scrapbook.

I've created a scrapbook print Photoshop action at work  (Robbies). It adds an off centre white border to the print, room for me to write on - just like instant Polaroid photos (remember them?) 

Its great, I can stick labels from new plants in the book next to photos of where I planted them with the date. No more cursing the garden label eating monster! (He's the younger brother of the sock eating monster that lives in my washing machine)

Now I'll be able to see exactly where my gaps are and this autumn I won't be digging up established bulbs as I plant new ones.

A surprise benefit

I'd forgotten just how beautiful real gloss photos are. Its a real treat to sit and look through the photos without sitting at a screen or peering at my phone.

What are you doing with your photos? Let me know in the comments.

Panoramic Photo stitch of my Garden

What a fantastic day in the garden - the first for almost a month. Blue sky, singing birds, lovely yellow daffs and purple crocus eye candy. You can't see the details but they are there! A fantastic day for me to take a series of photos and make the latest panoramic stitch of my garden.

Next time I am going to stand in the opposite corner so the garden is all visible from the other side.

I've got really good at taking photographs for making panoramic photo stitches. 

By making them from my own photos I've learned that it's all about what I do when I take the photo's and not so much about what I take the photos on. 

I'm doing another blog post on how to so everyone can have a go.

This stitch is done using Autostitch - you can download the free trial version here http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/brown/autostitch/autostitch.html

This free software will give you a file good enough for your screen. If you really get the bug and want to have files good enough to make prints from, you have a number of options. Buy the software, recent versions of photo shop have a very good stitch tool or you can pop into Robbies where I will do a stitch for you. 

After I took these photos I planted my broad beans, even though it was freezing! The beans can't wait any longer. It's British summer time next week and the days are now longer than the nights. Plant much later and there won't be enough time for them to grow.

its been so cold this March that my garden looks almost the same as it did in February. So when it finally warms up I am expecting a flower explosion. February, March and April flowers all at the same time.