Baked beans on Mars

Imagine harvesting vibrant, violet-hued pods that are not only a visual feast but also packed with nutrients and flavor. Whether you’re spicing up a stir-fry or looking to add a splash of color to your garden, Purple Beans are your ticket to an extraordinary experience.

Join us for an exclusive conversation with presenter, broadcaster and author Alan Titchmarsh. Recorded at BBC Gardeners’ World Live, and Hosted by presenter and broadcaster, Nicki Chapman, the audience listened in as Alan discussed what it means to be a good gardener… You can buy tickets for the next live show, BBC Gardeners’ World Autumn Fair here.

These are the Bean Watch 2008 seedlings this morning.

Ashley Dove-Jay, University of Bristol

Briardo Llorente, Macquarie University

Header image: Suited up to simulate the conditions of working outside on Mars. Jonathan Clarke (the author, left) with visiting engineer Michael Curtis-Rouse, from UK Space Agency (right). Jonathan Clarke personal collection, Author provided.

One of the first things I did in the garden last year, when we were still waiting for the hard landscaping to be finished, was to put some large, colourful planters into the front garden. To begin with they were planted with sweet peppers (actually cool chillies), but in the autumn I replanted them with their permanent contents, and they have become my container herb garden. Although they’re at the front of the house they are one of the easiest place to get to from the kitchen for a quick snip, and the paving means I can get there in my slippers…. This means I can, and do, just pop out to get a handful of fresh herbs, and we are starting to add more of them to our cooking.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.

Like new potatoes and asparagus, giant American marshmallows are clearly in season at the moment – they’re appearing in all the shops. We spotted them in our local garden centre (!) and, fresh from the success of our inaugural marshmallow toasting, we thought we’d set ourselves a challenge and see whether we could repeat it with something considerably larger.

In Jade Pearls and Alien Eyeballs I talk about the journeys plants have made with us – crisscrossing the globe and leaving Earth entirely for missions in space.

The weather has been pretty awful of late, with one winter storm after another bringing high winds and heavy rain to the garden. Saturday dawned mild and bright, and so it was definitely time to get some garden time in. I decided that the first order of business was to plant out the broad beans that I sowed in the Plotting Shed over the winter. I sowed two different sorts – field beans and a proper broad bean ‘Czak Rusga’. The field beans were, for the most part fine. The Czak Rusga tended to rot without sprouting, although two of the plants did make it in the end. The resulting plants are a bit of a motley crew.

I’m hoping to go and see The Martian soon, one of the few films to feature a botanist as the hero. Astronaut Mark Watney is one of the first humans to set foot on Mars, but accidentally gets left behind and has to survive on his own – and to do so he grows potatoes. He wouldn’t be the first person (or even population) to rely on potatoes for survival, but here on Earth there’s a slight snag. The potato (Solanum tuberosum) has an arch nemesis – late blight, caused by an organism called Phytophthora infestans. It cuts down both potatoes and tomatoes, and was the biological cause of the Irish Potato Famine in the 19th century.