On 17/09/2012 13:44, Dartmoor Will wrote:
Picked my first runner bean of the season this morning! Planted out the
young plants in June and it has taken this long to get a crop. If it had
not been for this warm and sunny Sept. I would have got nothing at all,
like my peas.

The picking is about 3 weeks later than normal as I usually start to
crop in late August. It's always going to be difficult growing veg. 1000
feet up on dartmoor but this year has been very hard due to the
extremely wet and cloudy summer. Amazingly the red flowers on the beans
are stunning, and there are a lot of them, so if the weather stays fine
I'll even have a few for the freezer!

Cheers from a sunny and warm dartmoor.

http://www.lyneside.demon.co.uk/Hayt...antage_Pro.htm
Will Hand (Haytor, Devon, 1017 feet asl)
---------------------------------------------


Friends brought round the first batch (about five pounds) off their
allotment last week. More to follow they say. Yummy. They taste
delicious. Freezer now filling up nicely, thank you.

Slightly off topic but along the same theme, blackberry picking this
year will not be. There is going to be a hell of a row about it, because
the council came round this morning and hacked out all the undergrowth,
which of course included all the brambles which had not yet formed the
fruit. On top of that, they also had a hack at the trees alongside the
footpaths and left them with dangerously stripped and pointy branches at
head height just off the line of the paths. Never seen it done like that
before. They also hacked back a private hedge which was not on their
land but had been carefully cut in line with the boundary by the
householder. There is going to be absolute hell over that one. By
council, I am of course referring to the "couldn't care a damn"
sub-contractor who does this work and the waste collections in town.

jim, Northampton