Monday 27 May 2013

Toilet Roll Runner Beans

I never was a gardener. As a hobby, gardening passed me by. My father said to me soon after our wedding: “Never have a garden bigger than your wife can cope with.” A phrase I repeated rather too often for Carol’s comfort. In fact I used to proudly state that I was a: “non-gardener and a non-smoker”.

However things change, particularly since we moved to this house which, as it turns out, has a garden that isn’t bigger than I can cope with. I now find that since it no longer takes half a day to mow the lawn, and working on just a small bed makes a difference that one can see straight away; that I’ve actually begun to enjoy being in the garden.

Today I planted out our runner beans. These are ‘toilet roll beans’. I saw somewhere that toilet rolls could be used instead of those expensive fibre pots for raising seeds. So we collected toilet roll centres for a year, and then I sowed the beans singly into the cardboard tubes full of compost.




Some of them started to undo when they were watered, so I stood them all together in a seed tray and run some string around them to keep them in place. Today I set up the bean sticks, scooped out holes and dropped the bean plants in. 


They have developed into good plants with a nice root growth, and have had minimal disturbance to be planted complete with their cardboard tubes which will just breakdown in the soil.