Dwarf french beans

CUCUMBERS AND COURGETTES

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My courgettes always did well on the allotment but I am adding cucumbers to the list this year. I have a couple of plants in each greenhouse and they are producing very well. I like munching on a sliced cucumber but there are limits to what I can manage….

and I decided to find something else. After searching I discovered a recipe for ‘quick pickled cucumber‘ and just tried it. Just delicious!

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The next huge harvest are courgettes, every year is the same. I thought I’d like to try something else and after another search found a recipe for fermenting vegetables. I mistakenly thought it to be very complicated. Not this recipe! I will have to be patient, follow the instructions very carefully and try it later. Watch this space.

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I had just enough of the following vegetables: courgettes, dwarf beans, Borloto beans, kohl rabi, courgettes and a small green chili pepper.

 

HARVEST

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It is all go on the allotment. This year the raspberries are amazing, I manage to pick a large box every other day. Not sure what I did but whatever it was it worked.

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The same goes for the red and white currants, beautiful. Here I know the reason, I did pamper all the fruit bushes in the fruit cage.

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I also had my first harvest of courgettes and french beans. Both are great, it is amazing how different the taste is when the fruit and vegetables are freshly picked.

 

 

But the biggest surprise are the aubergines. I always thought that they would be difficult to grow – not so. I had one plant last year and it produced some tasty fruit. This year I’m amazed how many I have. It seems that every seed I put in the soil germinated, I have aubergines in the greenhouse in the back garden and in both greenhouses.

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This is the biggest one so far. I have found a few good recipes and am looking forward to using them.

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Not bad for one aubergine. I’ll have to decide which recipe to use….

THE FUTURE IS….

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…blue, yellow, speckled and green, just like my beans.

I don’t grow the traditional runner beans but these beauties

The dark blue ones are Blauhilde, but they turn green when cooked.

Yellow flat beans are Golden Gate and produce amazingly long pods, taste great.

Green speckled beans are Selma Zebra and also turn green after cooking but with a hint of darker specks.

And the green ones are dwarf and climbing french beans.

What is there not to like!

MULTICOLOURED VEGETABLES

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I grow a variety of beans, either dwarf  or climbing beans but the only ones I don’t grow are runner beans. Somehow I find the flavour of the others is much better and also when slicing runner beans I found that it irritated my hands.

The blue ones don’t keep their colour when cooked, they turn dark green but the yellow beans look just about the same when cooked. Blue climbing beans are Blauhilde and the yellow are Golden Gate. In my opinion they are much tastier than runner beans.

My french beans are both dwarf and climbing, very prolific and very tasty.

Another splash of colour comes from the greenhouse this time – tomato Tigrella, cucumber Marketmore and lettuce Salad bowl.

DWARF FRENCH BEANS

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My first harvest of french beans. I always grew just the climbing beans – not runner beans, only any other, like Blauhilde or Hunter. Last year I tried for the first time the dwarf variety and was very pleased with the result, I had a great harvest, they just kept producing.

This year I started the dwarf beans in the greenhouse, as I did all the others but I planted them in one of my raised beds (this variety is called Safari). The soil in the beds doesn’t come up to the very top so the plants were nicely sheltered. I even covered them with a mesh, in case the pigeons wanted to have a nibble.

They grew well and the result is today’s picking.

005Meanwhile in the greenhouse things are speeding along. The tomato Tigrella is doing great; I can see why it is called this, even though it is still green.

Another great result is the cucumber. These are Marketmore and I had them last year and was very happy with the result that’s why I decided to have another go. I know they’re an outside variety but I was very happy with last year’s result that I decided to grow them inside the greenhouse.