Broad bean disaster on plot #103

Yes, we’ve lost half our beans! This is the first year we’ve had a broad bean disaster since we moved onto the Weald site, and I’ve got to be honest, it’s the result of a certain kind of smugness.

You see, in previous years we’ve been very careful about planting our beans as we’ve had complete crop failures on previous allotment sites. We plant early, we protect our beans before they germinate and after they germinate, and we take care to protect the seedling plants from pigeons. But this year we got sloppy.

The beans themselves were planted by students who were taking a Grow and Tell class with me and every single one germinated! But this week we saw that the tops had been eaten off about half of the seedlings and broad beans don’t usually come back from that kind of denudation.

What did we do wrong? Well, this was the first year we didn’t scatter holly prunings around the broad beans and so either mice, rats or pigeons, but probably mice, have quietly got in under the fleece covering and chewed the tender top leaves off our six inch tall seedlings. Grrr!

So we’re into plan B – raising the replacement seedlings in the cold greenhouse. Now, once you get into providing rodent food on your allotment, you’ll tend to continue providing rodent food whether you want to or not, so we’re sowing the new broad beans into paper pots that have been gently daubed with dilute Jeyes Fluid. You can use dilute patchouli oil if you dislike Jeyes for environmental or other reasons. The dilution in both cases is around 1% to 99% water and you just paint a little dab on the outside of the bottom of each paper pot. The strong odour keeps away the rodents until the seed germinates, at which point digging it up is of no interest to the mouse or rat. They will still be interested in the top leaves though, so when we plant, we’ll be strewing holly liberally to make it difficult for them to get to the plants – you bet we will!

Labels: allotment broad beans, broad bean leaves eaten, broad bean seedlings