Chicken-n-Veg

Posts Tagged ‘bean tepee’

After having a complete break from growing vegetables last year due to the rather awkward age of our son (very active toddler, too young to help, but old enough cause trouble, with a penchant for eating anything growing in the garden, edible or not), we thought we had should get back into the swing again this year. Our son is no longer a liability in the garden and loves nothing more than ‘helping’ whenever we’re outside. We have plenty of raised bed so we will let him have one of his own to work, with his own set of mini tools, whilst we’re busy with ours. Hopefully this will keep him happily pottering next to us and prevent him from digging up our seeds.

We unfortunately missed the start of the growing season as we were too busy with other home improvement projects. So none of the normal potato, onion or garlic crops for us this year, but we can still expect a bumper supply of salad leaves, herb, tomatoes, chilli, runner beans, courgettes, etc. to compensate.

The first job was to remove the polythene sheets that had been covering most of the raised beds for the last year or so. The sheets had done a good job of keeping out most of the weeds, except around the edges. The worms and ants had also done a good job of turning over the soil under the covers. We really didn’t have too much work to get them ready for planting.

Within a few hours all beds were cleared of weeds. The two beds to the right in the above photo, which were visibly still full of weeds, have now been cleared and will eventually be our fruit beds. They will be planted with raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb, etc. at the appropriate time.

We erected two tepees for French beans, using Laurel branches from the garden. One was planted with French Bean seedlings from the greenhouse and we directly planted Dwarf French “Purple Queen” Bean seeds around the other, for a later crop. We also planted two varieties of outdoor cucumbers in large pots near the greenhouse and plenty of courgette seedlings and seeds in the same beds as the bean tepees.

We’ll plant out the herb and salad seeds as soon as possible. We’ll probably use DIY seed tape for quite a few of the smaller seeds as we have documented previously.