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I’m worries about the beans. They’ve been going great guns, and have so far provided enough veg for five meals. I’m worried about the lack of new growth, though, and in particular the lack of new flowers on the French bean plants, which are starting to look less like veggie vines, and more like an acrobatics troupe of stick insects.

I suspect it’s because they’re growing in pots rather than the ground, and they’ve already gobbled up all the composty goodness. So, this morning I bought some fertiliser on the way in to work and sprinkled it liberally in the tops of the pots in the hope of reviving them - particularly as the one person who urged me to grow French beans in time for her next visit will be back in two weeks, and there’s a very good chance they’ll all have been picked and eaten by then.

Nonetheless, it seems a good time to tally up the picking totals to date, so here are the results for the French and runner beans.

So in total, 610 grams of French beans and 305 grams of runner beans.

It doesn’t equate to a great saving in the shops. The runner beans would have been about £2.26, according to the Asda online store, and I can’t find anyone selling fresh French beans (frozen in Sainsburys, canned in Waitrose, unheard of in Tesco or Asda), but if we take stringless as a close equivalent, they would have been £2.98, so £5.24 all in.

That pretty much covers the cost of the seeds, compost and water, so they need to pop out a little more to pay their way. I have no doubt the runners will continue to fruit - for a while longer at least - but it remains to be seen whether the fertiliser can do its magic on the French.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.