Greens are good for you (Runner Beans)

Member Name: January

Product:	Runner Beans
Date:	04/04/03 (507 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good for you

Disadvantages: none

I'm not very good at eating greens, I have always been a fussy eater and loathe things like cabbage, spinach and brussel sprouts.
I was very limited on which greens I ate untill I started to grow my own. I am convinced they are a different taste to the greens you get in the shops.
One of my favorite greens is runner beans.

I worked on a fruit and vegetable farm a few years ago and I used to pick runner beans, raspberries, strawberries and sort the potatoes. It was while I worked on this farm that I started to eat runner beans, fresh from the field, hand picked and tender not stringy and tough. Then when I got a house with a garden runner beans was a natural choice of greens to grow in my garden.

Runner beans are a climbing plant and have a very nice scarlet flower, they attract the bees into your garden too, which I think is important. You can either grow them up against a trestle fence or use bamboo sticks or poles to grow them up.
Runner beans like rich soil and you can add things like manure, lime and compost into the ground where you are going to grow your crop, some people grow them in seed trays before planting out.

On the fruit farms they are grown in little plastic polly tunnels before being exposed to the open air. I just plant straight into the ground about the end of march early april.
Everyone has their own preferance.

Plant your seedlings or beans about 9 to 12 inches apart so they have the room to grow each plant will climb up a pole or trestling and can be helped up by gently training them round the poles or trestle.
They should flower and pod during the summer months, pick the tender beans from the bottom of the plants, this encourages the next lot of beans futher up the plant to grow, water well once the sun has gone down and don't leave the beans on the plants too long or they will get big and tough.

Happy growing and eating.

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