Growing Beans with Susan Young (GotG43)

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.

You’ve probably heard of companion planting: Grouping different plant species near each other to the mutual or sole benefit of one or the other. Companion planting methods are used for various reasons, most commonly to repel pests. Herbs, including thyme, are often recommended companion plants. So what companion plants go well with thyme? Read on to learn about companion plants for thyme.

These are the Bean Watch 2008 seedlings this morning.

Now that the arbor is up, I need to think about surrounding it with plants. I have climbing achocha and mashua which might (hopefully) provide some shade. Once you’ve eliminated the possibility of heat stroke, you’re left with that other perennial summer problem – pests. How do you stop bugs great and small from bugging you, or committing suicide in the jug of Pimms?

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.

Growing lettuce on the Moon is a step closer, as a French start-up has successfully grown lettuce in simulated lunar soil.

The broad bean season is largely over now (unless you invest in the new autumn-cropping variety, Luz de Otono), but every time I pod my beans I ponder how much waste is going straight onto the compost heap. Broad beans have to be some of the best packaged seeds in the plant world, with a thick pod filled with fluffy wadding.

When someone says orchid, what springs to mind? Probably the beautiful and showy hybrid orchids you can buy in the garden centre, or possibly the tropical orchids Kew does such magnificent displays with during its annual orchid festival. The cultivation of tropical orchids became popular in Britain in the seventeenth century. At the time, no one knew how to propagate orchids from seed, and wild plants were dug up and imported en masse, devastating their native habitats. By the nineteenth century, people had realised that the common British wildflowers they had been overlooking were also orchids. They too became popular with collectors, with some species being driven to the brink of extinction by over-collection and the intensification of agriculture.

This is one of a series of posts looking at what we might eat on Mars, where most food would have to be shelf-stable, tinned or freeze-dried. You can find other posts on this topic under the Martian Meals tag.

Join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores gardening on Earth… and beyond! Emma’s guest on this week’s show is Dr Karl Hasenstein, the Principal Investigator for the Plant Habitat-02 experiment, which is currently growing radishes on the International Space Station.

On 31 January 1971, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa launched on their Apollo 14 mission to the Moon. While Shepard and Mitchell walked on the Moon, Roosa stayed in orbit, taking photographs and performing experiments. Tucked away in his personal belongings were 500 tree seeds, which orbited the Moon 34 times.

Thomas Pesquet’s Alpha mission is about to bloom! The ESA astronaut will soon be growing flowers on the International Space Station, in an experiment called “Graines d’Eklo”.