We have Runners...

If I had to nominate my favourite vegetable, I reckon that Runner Beans would be a strong contender. They are a crop that I grow every year. So do 99% of all Allotment holders in the UK, apparently, judging by the masses of them I see from the train on my journeys to and from London.

My 14 plants are covered with scarlet flowers:

Close inspection reveals that many tiny bean pods are also forming:

In some years pod-formation (or flower set) can be poor, which is influenced by a number of factors including moisture levels. When the weather is hot and dry you are supposed to spray your plants with a fine mist of water. No such requirement this year! Runner Beans also like lots of moisture (and preferably shade) at the roots, so I often end up watering them every day, but I have only had to do that once so far this year, way back at the end of May. If you're planning to grow Runners for the first time next year, my advice is to choose somewhere with moisture-retentive soil - either naturally or artificially. It's a good idea to incorporate lots of bulky organic matter for this reason. Some people dig a planting-trench at about Christmas-time and gradually fill it up with vegetable peelings from the kitchen over the next few months, and then cover the trench with soil shortly before planting the young beans after the danger of frost has passed. I don't use this method myself, but I do try to dig-in a fair bit of home-made compost a few weeks before planting.

These tiny pods will grow rapidly now, and I expect to be harvesting the first of them in a couple of weeks' time.

Elsewhere in the garden, there are beans of several different sorts. In a big tub over by the brick wall I have a wigwam of bamboo canes supporting Climbing French Beans "Cobra" and a few of  "Mechelse Tros" (aka Mushy Pea bean).

All the plants in that tub look yellow and sickly. I think they are just not getting enough light. I probably won't grow beans there again next year.

The Mechelse Tros have plain white flowers like this:

And Cobra has pale mauve ones:

I have several pots of Dwarf French Beans, dotted about wherever there is space:

The plant with the paler foliage in that photo above is "Polka", which produces yellow pods, like this:

There are also the "Cherokee Trail of Tears" beans, of course, in the Three Sisters bed:

That's their wigwam in the centre, with Broad Beans at the left of the picture, and Runner Beans to the right.

This is a Cherokee flower. Very beautiful, I think.

So you see, my garden is full of beans!