In among the beans

Back at long last. I’ve been away from the garden somewhat in the past few days.   But I launched in today with a mission: weed the vegetable bed.   I had to nip into town first thing to change my strimmer wire, and grab some compost. I loathe the idea of doing all this careful weeding and then having bare earth.

Because bare earth becomes weed infested in no time.   So even though the compost was more expensive than I wanted, it will do to mulch around the plants. If I had el cheapo bulko compost I could have covered the entire area.   But not this time.

So starting with the potato bed I dug up spuds, cleared weeds and then raked things flat. The charlottes and belle de fontenays are tiny here. But it’s entirely my fault as I didn’t give them enough soil to earth up as they grew.   And the green manure was too successful.   So all sorts of things learned for next year’s crop.

Thank goodness I have rows and rows of spuds up at the top vegetable bed; they are huge and happy.   And for the moment still in the ground. I have only been finding the time to dig up a few plants for each meal.   But hopefully I will put in a concerted effort over the next few days.

The work took longer than I thought. Mostly because it was so warm and I was flagging.   But I was determined to get the bean quadrant sorted before it was time to come indoors and watch the Tour de France.

And here is the difference in styles in the beans.   I have chosen to plant half of them close together, interplanted with marigolds and leeks and barely leaving any soil exposed.   The beans are forced to grow a bit taller to catch the light, but they don’t seem to flop.

Harvesting them is better when you think of it as braille. You just have to run your hands through the plants and wait until a heavy bean catches your hand.   I have easily picked a kilo of beans just weeding.

And then there is the evenly spaced and more traditional method of planting.   With lots of scary brown soil in between. I will have to get my hoe out to weed these in future.

But I have put the new mulch around each plant.

Naturally I had to water first so that was a fun half hour.   Our spring is still overflowing, so it is an entirely guilt free activity.

And during the watering I heard the most tremendous noise down by the road.   We can sometimes here bulldozers lumbering past, but this sounded closer.   And lo and behold, Michel the commune handyman drove up with the village verge cutter.

The poor man was probably just trying to turn the vehicle around as we have a turning area, but I hailed him and we had a chat.   And I begged him to do our bank on his way back down.

What a delightful thing it is to watch a machine strim a bank which would take me at least half an hour to do on my own.

That was something off the list.

Tomorrow I need to do a few vases of flowers for my neighbour Daniele first thing. It should be easy as the cosmos is coming along.   And then I want to attack the cabbages.   Now that’s something to look forward to. Not.