Planting out broad beans & lots of digging!

Planted out some broad beans today, just next to the runner bean trench I dug last week. They are supposed to be ok in quite cold weather, so we'll see how they do. I grew them in the kitchen in root trainers, to give them a good start as the trainers allow the roots to grow quite big before planting out. I know the old guys rototilling think my plot is weird as I swaddled the beans in fleece, like a little baby! Here is the odd-loooking result.

I'm not sure if I know what they taste like but I think they might be like butter beans in a tin. Here are some recipes and a pic of what they look like when ready, apparently you can eat the whole pod when they are small, then eat the green beans, then dry the beans for soups etc over winter. Sounds quite useful!

Creating a trench for runner beans

My allotment neighbour, David, a sprightly 84-year-old, suggested I get going on a bean trench when I went up to the site yesterday. Good advice as the soil was mostly too wet to dig, but I could dig out the trench from the side path without treading on the soil. It wasn't too hard as I had already dug most of it over in the autumn. Here's how it should look (on the left) and how mine does look (shown below) - not quite so photogenic! Since I should have started this a few months ago I plan next weekend to dump in my current kitchen scraps plus a bag of well-rotted manure from the garden centre (as I don't have any compost yet since I haven't been diligent enough in collecting kitchen waste over the winter due to the need to drive it up to the allotment site from home). For more info on how to build one see the Garden Organics page on trenches. What that page does not say, however, is that it is helpful to put newspapers or cardboard at the bottom of the trench, as this retains moisture. David also suggested that if you don't have manure or kitchen scraps, to put in upside-down turfs (turves?) i.e. chunks of grass with the soil stuck to it that you dig up from elsewhere, which I did, then covered with a bit of compost.