Last peas, first beans

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My peas are just about finished, after producing what for me was my best crop of peas ever (this is a figure of speech called “damning with faint praise”). Seriously, we have had a respectable amount of peas – and very nice they were too!

Since I have been picking the pea pods, the plants have responded by producing a second flush of flowers.

I’m not sure what to do about these. Should I leave them to develop into useable pods, or should I pull the plants up? The plants look pretty tired and I can’t imagine the second crop could be very big. Furthermore, I really want to remove the plants to give the Beetroot some more light. Decisions, decisions!

The beans, on the other hand, are just set to deliver their first pods. These are those spare plants that I left in their pots:

The two “Cobra” climbing French bean plants were very poorly indeed a couple of weeks ago, but with the addition of some Growmore general-purpose plant food and a bit of TLC, they have perked up quite nicely.

They will never deliver more than the odd few beans of course, but it has been fun keeping them going anyway.

The Runners that got the same treatment are looking pretty good too, with nice healthy foliage and several sprays of flowers. I keep pinching out the shoots in order to keep the plants compact.

Most of the early flowers dropped off without being pollinated, but then that’s normal, even on the main plants grown conventionally. A few pods have formed though:

The big plants in one of the raised beds are looking “exuberant”, though the new variety “Tenderstar” has noticeably less foliage and fewer flowers than the traditional type “Streamline”. It will be interesting to compare the yields from the two varieties.

This is “Streamline”:

And this is “Cobra”. I’ll be picking the first pods of these very soon.

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