Tag Archives: beans

Beans, Peas, Pre-germination

Pre Germinating Peas or Beans

Pre germinating Peas or Beans

Sometime you may find yourself with some seeds that are well out of date but you may still want to try and grow them either because they are rare, scarce or of unknown origin

When it come to Peas or beans one of the ways to get the best germination and also avoid lots of wasted compost or space on a propagating bench is to pre-germinate then before sowing

Technique

Take your seeds and in a container cover them with luck warm water and leave somewhere like the kitchen for 12 hours during which time the outside coating of the seed will soften and allow moisture to enter swelling the seed which encourages the seed to germinate.  Any that don’t discard at this point

Drain the seeds and place a piece moisture retentive cloth like that has been dampened but is not soaking wet into the bottom of a plastic container.

Place lid on the container and keep at around 75 degrees as we want to achieve quick germination and peas are affect quite a lot by temperature

Germination temperature for peas : 40 F to 85 F – Days to emergence: 9 to 13 –

Optimum around 75 F.

9 days when soil is 60 F.

13 days at 50 F.

It may take as long as 4 to 5 weeks at 40 F.

As soon as the peas show the first emerging shoot carefully pick them out of the container and place them into short root trainers pots of Multipurpose compost  roughly 2cms deep and cover with more compost.

 

 

 

 

When the peas emerge grow them on in a cold frame till around 5cms high when they can be planted out into a growing bed.

 

 

 

 

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Beans, Climbing beans, Dwarf French beans, Sweetcorn

Planting Sweetcorn with Beans

A classic technique often recommended for interplanting crops is the 3 sisters, were Corn has beans and squash planted between

This method was used by the Plains Indians in the USA and works very well , unfortunately when applied to UK conditions and varieties it doesn’t!!

I have developed a method Continue reading Planting Sweetcorn with Beans →

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Beans, Broad beans, Fava beans

How to grow Broad Beans or Fava Beans

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Broad Beans are one of the most useful crops we can grow, they fill a gap in the garden over winter when little else is growing and the beans germinate at lower temperatures than even grass starts to grow at in spring. This means that we can plant them as early as February and continue to start them off and plant them right up until May, this method gives us a continuance of cropping.

One of the other great things about growing broad beans is like all legumes they fix nitrogen into the soil and this allows us to increase the soil fertility for a follow-on crop which makes them perfect to sow in a bed before nitrogen hungry summer crops.

You can sow seeds directly into the soil, but my preferred method is to raise them in either root trainers or the centre of cardboard toilet rolls. Continue reading How to grow Broad Beans or Fava Beans →

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