Bean surprise

I do love being surprised in this way.

See my tiny, lonely string bean plant above?

I seem to be jinxed when it comes to growing beans.  Funny, it's supposed to be an easiest plant in the world to grow, even schoolchildren can do it, FFS! I can't.  Or at least, have a misfortune after misfortune when I attempt to. 

I've sown six beans altogether, of which only a single plant sprouted.  After few weeks of indoor growing I moved it to the balcony, when it was promptly battered by stormy weather - it lost nearly half of its leaves, which were never particularly plentiful anyway.

After this first disaster it seemed to be doing all right-ish, growing very slowly, with leaves turning rather yellow, but growing.  It even developed few flowers.

I never really hoped that the flowers would turn into anything, it's a bit high for bees and I didn't bother to artificially fertilise few flowers on a single plant.  It got stormy again, so I stayed away from my balcony and pretty much forgot all about the bean plant.

I checked it after a few days and - surprise, surprise! - it had few pods developed and growing!

It looks like I'm going to have a superabundant harvest of five bean pods pretty soon.

Well, if I throw it into a soup, I may even be able to see it when I'm eating it!

OK, I know that five pods is pitiful, but tiny harvest is better than no harvest.  I might even try my luck and sow some more beans?

In an ex-raspberry bucket, perhaps?

Green growing

Is there a limit to what you can use as a planting pot? 

Behold my latest experiment - an egg carton full of growing radishes.  Looks allright, doesn't it?

It seems to be my tiny obsession these days, you know, turning contents of my rubbish bag into containers.  I even wrote a full size article about it - How to turn your garbage into a garden? - check it out if you have a second to spare.  You'll find many more funky ideas there.

But anyway, back to the egg carton.  So far it's working, but as I'm suffering from an attack of honesty, let me share some of my radish worries.  So -

THINGS YOU HAVE TO WATCH OUT FOR WHEN GROWING PLANTS IN AN EGG CONTAINER:

1.  The amount of soil per each plant is tiny.  Tiny, tiny, tiny.  I'm not so sure if it contains enough nutrients for the plant to grow full size.  But plants tend to have an amazing will to live, so fingers crossed, it may yet work.

2. It dries up fast as hell.  You need to be REALLY careful with your watering schedule, as omitting a single day may result in a dead plant. 


Apart from those, there seem to be no further obstacles to the project, but I'll keep you updated if something pops up.