The runner bean is a great British summer vegetable that is easy to grow and delicious to eat, but it seems that it has been forgotten by a large number of people, dismissed as old fashioned, probably because they have been used to it being boiled to within an inch of its life by generations of school cooks!

The number of households buying British runner beans is declining with only 12% of households buying runner beans during 2010, down 22.7% in the last 5 years. When you consider that over 85% of households buy carrots, the number of us enjoying great British runners just doesn’t measure up!

The British Bean & Pea Campaign contacted me as they are spearheading a runner bean revival, reminding us that runner beans are delicious, crunchy beans that are incredibly versatile!

They can be sown now, and most varieties should be ready to pick in July, and can continue until the first frosts, or sometimes even longer if the plant is protected.

Runner beans, and other beans are ideal if you only have a small garden. Firstly sow one seed about 4cm deep in a small pot filled with compost. Then either keep them in a greenhouse until they germinate, or line them up on a sunny windowsill. They should all have germinated within three weeks.

Once you’re ready to plant them out, fill a large planter up with compost, then make a wigwam with tall canes lashed together with string at the top. Then wind the string around the canes until you reach the bottom, tie it tightly and put this into the planter. Your runner bean seedlings can then be planted at the bottom of the canes, and they will happily climb up to the top of the wigwam all summer long.

So it’s time to re-discover this great, traditional British veg. Just remember that if you are boiling them, they need no longer than ten minutes to become tender, rather than the best part of the morning like the school cook used to do.

Both myself and @luckylottielisa have been busy bees over the weekend.


Despite only getting our allotment plot in January, and also all the late frosts doing their best to kill anything we took the chance to plant out, we had our first major harvest from the plot this weekend.

We’d been able to pick a few peas and broad beans here and there, but this weekend, we lifted all the first and second early potatoes, and now have enough of them to feed an army! The picture above is me planting two varieties of pumpkins and some climbing courgettes in the place where they used to be.

The planned third installment of building ‘Chickenopolis’ was postponed as I had a monumental hangover, so instead I used the carcasses of some old drawers as raised beds, and planted the baby turnip seedlings.

The onions are also looking suspiciously ready, even though technically we shouldn’t be pulling them until August. They have swelled that much with the changeable weather, that we had to pull a few onions anyway to give the others more room to grow. We used them in a Shepherd’s Pie for dinner yesterday, and they weren’t bad at all!

The sweetcorn is really kicking into life now as well, so it looks as if we will have an OK crop from those as well.

What I can’t work out though is why some of the chillies in my greenhouse have decided that they want to flower, even though they are only about a foot tall!

Since we want to have chickens as soon as possible, (allotment site rules say we can’t have them until we have been on the site for a year) we thought it was time to start clearing the space where they are going to live.

We moved the greenhouse to a more logical place last weekend, and this weekend started the job of clearing the large pile of assorted rubbish that the previous plotholders had shoved behind it.

We foolishly thought this would take us no more than a couple of hours, but combined with sweltering sunshine, we found that the mound of earth and rubbish contained glass, rotting carpet, stones, rocks, roots, and lots of other nasties.

We eventually cleared it by the end of the day, and levelled the ground out, so stage two of Chickenopolis, (building their coop) will have to wait until next weekend.

Once that is up, we will then build a bigger run around it, so that the ex-batts that we want to adopt will have some room to roam around if we are not up there to let them roam around our lottie!

So, as you can see from the pictures, the lottie is changing shape. We were also excited to find pods appearing behind the gorgeous purple flowers on the broad beans, and also our first pods appearing on the peas!

I can’t wait to taste the first harvest from our plot … and also to welcome the chickens when they arrive too!

I decided to bite the bullet this weekend and plant up the rest of the broad bean and sweetcorn plants that were growing too big for the greenhouse.


I have some more coming up in the greenhouse, along with some late peas, French and runner beans. Although the forecast is for frost this week, it has been for ages, and I’m hoping that since my plot is sheltered, then it will escape the worst of any frosts.

I also needed to make room in the greenhouse for my Purple Casbah tomato plants that are growing crazy, and also the several varieties of chillies that are fighting for space in there as well.

One of the things that made me smile while I was down the lottie today was these gorgeous purple flowers that had appeared on the broad bean plants this week. These were grown from the seeds that I received from the Heritage Seed Library at Garden Organic. The bees seemed to love them, but they wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to take a photo of them as well!

What a fantastic weekend. Sunny skies all the way through, and I ended up with red arms!

We spent all of Saturday building frames for the beans and peas to climb up, and then we planted the “Hugh’s Huge” peas and “Crimson Flowered” broad beans. I have a load more of both, together with runner and french beans coming up in the greenhouse.

We were also frantically trying to clear the overgrown bit on the right hand side of the lottie, as we have 42 sweetcorn plants (they all germinated!!), and several other things in the greenhouse that will need a new home at some point. Luckily, one of our friends there has a petrol rotavator/tiller that made the job a lot easier.

I’ll try and take some pictures tomorrow night when I go down to water.

Hope you all had the chance to enjoy the glorious weather this weekend.

Those very nice people at Figo Frames gave me a ‘taster’ pack of their new product, to show me how easy it can be to build things to protect my crops in my allotment, or to help them to grow.

I had tried various other products to build things like fruit cages, or tripods, and always got frustrated because they never allowed me to build it how I wanted it.

The picture above shows the genius of the product. In each box, you get six 3-way connectors, and four 4-way connectors. Into each of these, you insert your bamboo canes, or rods, or other poles.

The connectors are completely flexible, unlike other products that I have tried, so you can use them to create many different structures, such as a fruit cage, a cloche, or a tripod.

This is the easiest way that I have found to build garden structures. Visit their website for more information.