Page 11 - Simply Vegetables Spring 2025

First harvest of beans
given the short duration between planting
out and harvesting. The main thing we
struggle with is slugs and snails, so you
need to make sure you protect the plants
one way or another depending on your
preferred method of slug/snail control. We
did also have a little trouble with a local
neighbourhood cat last year too – who
decided the raised bed made easy digging
for litter tray purposes. Needless to say, that
didn’t happen too many times before we
put some netting around the raised bed to
prevent any further disruption to our plants!
By mid-May, we had a couple of
sowings of lettuces planted out, including
an Iceberg type lettuce. It’s important to
remember that this type of lettuce needs a
bit more space in between each plant than
the little gem types though.
Last year, we also grew some Venice
bush dwarf beans in one corner of the
bed. We planted these out about 6 inches
(15cm) apart in early May. Again, these
were initially sown in cell trays and then
planted out once they had their first true
leaves (again, around a month after sowing
at that time of year). We find this a safer
method than planting directly into the soil,
as there are too many variables that can
come into play where that’s the case –
whether it’s the seeds getting too damp
and rotting off, or birds and mice digging
Raised bed at the end of June
Lettuce harvest
up the seeds!
Although ideally, they would’ve been
given a little more space, they grew well
overall, and actually we think that planting
them closer together gave them a bit more
protection in windier weather.
You can see from the photo as we got to
the start of June that it doesn’t take long for
it to fill up, and we started to harvest our
first lettuces.
By mid-June, you can see from the photo
that the French beans were flowering
and had just started to set. I always think
that summer is well on the way when that
happens! Although it also means that the
plants are going to start to get the weight
of the beans on soon. Therefore, we like
to stake the plants with a short bamboo
cane or similar and loosely tie the plant
at a couple of places to the cane. This
helps support the plant as it starts to get
the weight of beans on it, but also gives
Raised bed at the start of May
Second harvest of beans
some protection if we have windy weather.
Otherwise, we find that the construct of
these bush dwarf beans means that they
can completely snap off right at the base
at soil level, at which point its unfortunately
game over!
We started harvesting these French
beans towards the end of June and got a
decent crop each week through to mid-
July. Another thing we’ve found with these
French beans is that they get a second
wind. Therefore, when they stopped
cropping in mid-July, we made sure that
all the beans were removed and then
kept looking after the plants, watering
regularly and feeding with a liquid feed as
we thought necessary. As a result, they
reflowered a month or so later, and we
picked a second crop of beans from the
third week in August for another couple of
weeks.
Simply Vegetables 11