Sowing French climbing beans in deep root trainers

Our climbing French beans were such a hit last year, that we were definitely keen to sow them again.

They were relatively easy to grow, looked great, tasted great and were even better with the recipe we found for preserving them. What more could you ask for? More beans, of course!

Learning from last year

We decided to stick with exactly what we did last year – Suttons’ colourful climbing mix.

The only issue we had last year was that the slugs loved the beans, too. We had to replace our greenhouse-grown seedlings with some that were direct sown when they vanished overnight.

Last year’s bean seedlings vanished overnight

So this year, we’ll be making sure we have good slug control in place when we plant our our seedlings. You can read about controlling slugs and snails on an earlier blog post.

If you are going to use a chemical control, please be aware the non-organic controls use the active ingredient metaldehyde.

When ingested, metaldehyde can be transformed into a different toxin, which can be hazardous for the hedgehogs, birds and other wildlife that consume slugs.

Trying the deep root trainer

This year, Andrew wanted to experiment with sowing our bean seeds in a deep root trainer. How can see how and why on this video:

We’re using Haxnicks Deep Root trainers which we picked up at at the garden centre.

The pack comes with 36 cells, a frame to contain them and a propagating lid.

Hopefully, we’ll be seeing some more beans like these this year, too.

Some of our 2017 beans

We’ll keep you posted.