Keeping busy with broad beans
A pretty garden on the Hampshire coast with a vegetable patch, stream and woodland.
The garden’s drying nicely after a week or so without rain, but the daily frost is making things difficult. There’s still not much that can be done in the flower beds, but John has been busy clearing up leaves and planting out broad beans – 90 of them this year!
He swears by Terry Walton’s advice to put them in peat in a plastic bag to sprout, then they go into root trainers on the spare bedroom windowsill (we haven’t got a greenhouse), and he has had 100 per cent success rate.
He thinks he plants them later than most people but the ‘Aquadulce’ variety catches up, and we usually have a great crop in June. We’ve also been clearing the small branches that fall from the trees and shredding them, ready to use as a mulch for the beds later. We’ve been making the most of the odd sunny day and recently had a lovely day out at West Dean, near Chichester, Sussex, to see the snowdrops, out in all their glory. Another day we had a very bracing walk around Hampshire’s Hilliers Arboretum to view the winter garden, which gave us lots of ideas. One was to plant Carex morrowii ‘Fisher’s Form’ among our cornus, which made a stunning display with the red stems of the cornus. I couldn’t resist buying a pretty Helleborus orientalis and a pot of daffodils and polyanthus to stand outside the windows to brighten up the view. The day we’d planned to go to RHS Garden Wisley it was barely above freezing and very windy, so we decided it would be more pleasant to leave that until later! More cold weather’s on the way we hear, so we’re hoping to complete our tidy up before our upcoming spring break in the sun.