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.