Nine Bean Rows

Last years' tomato vines in the tunnel have been reduced to crunchy brown leaves with clouds of botritus (the powdery grey fungus spores you get on fruit past its sell-by). Help is on its way for the clear out – and to bring a much needed trailer load of well rotted manure. ‘If you don't have New Zealand flatworms already, you will now'. The need for manure outweighs the vileness of picking out flatworms, which are basically like small anchovies that cannibalise the good earth worms.

The bean rows – and by sheer accident there really were only nine - of last years' runners are still clinging to the bamboo poles. (The photo is tomato vines and a few french beans, the runners were outside of course). I don't actually remember eating a single one as they were a tough, leathery variety, but the flowers are always gorgeous. It looks like there is an inversely proportionate relationship between flower-gorgeousness and runnerbean-edibile-ness.

Decision to blog. Recording a year in a novice (ish) kitchen garden in the North West of Ireland. Not quite Nigel Slater's kitchen diaries (less meat, less butter) but there should be good food, enthusiastic juicing and some experimental raw recipes tried and tested (new hero atm David Wolfe) with produce straight out of the garden. Hoping to bring a little sunshine and chlorophyll to friends without gardens - especially those in Londinium. So if you're trapped in a hectic office in Kentish Town, then I can sow, plant, water, weed, harvest and eat a spring onion or two for you. And if you are also starting out on growing your own, maybe we can mutually - or virtually - support each others' sweet pea tendrils.