To tell the truth, this post is long overdue. We have started harvesting the runner beans for almost a month now.Beans is the first vegetable we aimed at growing when we set the garden first. This was decided mainly citing two reasons. 1. We had plenty of experience growing beans in the past every time with a bountiful of results. 2. We started gardening in August which was the appropriate time to plant beans aiming for a harvest in the colder months.
The seeds were sown around August second week. Five seeds were sown and all of them germinated. I must admit I grew really impatient around November wondering why the plants did not flower yet. My mom was assuring me every now and then that Jan and Feb are the peak flowering and pod bearing months for Beans. And so it did!
The flowering happened around December second week and you can see it had its first visitor Mr.Bee the moment it opened.
Beans generally do not require much fertilizers and hence we did not add any except for some homemade compost. But as an afterthought I feel we should have sowed the five plants in different containers.We grew it in a big plastic grow bag wide enough to berth all the five plants but I still feel with different containers the harvest would have been a little higher in the scale.
Another lesson learnt was to add more compost during the flowering stages and I did just that last week. Evidently we could visibly see the difference in the new shoot and flower counts in the plants for this one week.
But still the harvests we had so far is much less compared to what we had around 15 years when we first grew the beans. This maybe due to the obvious lack of nutrients in the potting mix-which contained the red soil mainly from the nearby railway grounds...another suspect is the seed quality.The seeds were bought in the Sunday weekly market in our locals. So our potting mix for the next batch of seeds is not going to have any red soil but only cocopeat with homemade compost and will have more organic fertilizers like PG. I already made the trip to the seed shop in the town with my dad to buy some bush variety flat beans.
Fingers crossed for the second season ..
The seeds were sown around August second week. Five seeds were sown and all of them germinated. I must admit I grew really impatient around November wondering why the plants did not flower yet. My mom was assuring me every now and then that Jan and Feb are the peak flowering and pod bearing months for Beans. And so it did!
The flowering happened around December second week and you can see it had its first visitor Mr.Bee the moment it opened.
Beans generally do not require much fertilizers and hence we did not add any except for some homemade compost. But as an afterthought I feel we should have sowed the five plants in different containers.We grew it in a big plastic grow bag wide enough to berth all the five plants but I still feel with different containers the harvest would have been a little higher in the scale.
Another lesson learnt was to add more compost during the flowering stages and I did just that last week. Evidently we could visibly see the difference in the new shoot and flower counts in the plants for this one week.
But still the harvests we had so far is much less compared to what we had around 15 years when we first grew the beans. This maybe due to the obvious lack of nutrients in the potting mix-which contained the red soil mainly from the nearby railway grounds...another suspect is the seed quality.The seeds were bought in the Sunday weekly market in our locals. So our potting mix for the next batch of seeds is not going to have any red soil but only cocopeat with homemade compost and will have more organic fertilizers like PG. I already made the trip to the seed shop in the town with my dad to buy some bush variety flat beans.
Fingers crossed for the second season ..
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