Don't forget to put your broad beans in during the first week of November if it's frost free .
If you've never had them or had a lousy experience with them , they are really quite nice when straight off the plant and not fully grown , lightly boiled and buttered or with white sauce . None of that stinky smell you get from the ones you'd get in hospital that stink to high heaven and taste absolutely vile . !2 plants have given me about 1& 1/2 pounds of shelled beans .
As I'm th only one who eats them I blanched them for a timed 90 second scald in boiling water , a quick drain and then plunged them into a big bowl of iced water to stop the cooking process.
After draining them I put them in 25's in cut down heat sealed vac packed bags & labeled them up & bunged them in the dep freezer . They will last me through the year and also see a few go into the occasional stew pot .
I've been busy moving five full plastic Dalek type compost bins ( 650 cubic litres worth ) some 30 mtrs away to the back of my property now that the landscaping has been completed and things have settled down to growing .
They are full of four year old well made animal dungs & associated beddings compost , old kitchen waste plus a lot of wet straw & shredded garden stuff including 40 or so feet ( both sides ) of chipped / mulched 12 foot tall Leylandi hedge cuttings .
It's taken me nearly two weeks , doing a bit whenever I was able . Interspersed with that I also dumped a couple of buckets of the compost in each 9 square foot X 900 mm high raised bed that need if for the compost hungry crops of next year .
One of these beds was captured by Alison some 18 months ago and covered in 3 mm thick engineering construction waterproof sheet , she'd had some of her Bonsai collection in it till I got the 12 mtrs of 60 wide staging set up for her bonsai .
It had compressed some nine inches , so yesterday afternoon I added four bucket of compost , four buckets of mulched up coir and two buckets of coarse vermiculite granules then turned it in several times over .
The bed is now full to the brim , I might just stuff a couple of dozen semi hard wood fuchsia cuttings in it, for the bed that I did that in last year produced a decent plant on nearly every cutting ( thanks to hormone rooting compound as well
)
Next week ought to see me starting to draw up my new seed sowing charts for 2017 and discard any seeds that didn't do very well this year .
Some of my seeds are many years older than the seed houses suggest you keep them .
It's been a revealing experience to decant 7 store in tip top storage conditions and work out the real viability of seeds from info off the internet .
Round here most of the garden centers are clearing the seeds of the shelves in readiness for the Christmas tat & as a result are marking nearly all seeds down in price often to at least half or less . Last year we saved nearly £78 if my memory serves me correctly .
Next week is also the latest time I can take cuttings off my perennial Kale ( Chou d' Aubenton Sp??) My strain of plants must be getting on for five or six yerrs old now . Each year I've run several sets of followers four months or so apart then chopped up & composted the old gnarly plant once I have some new healthy productive plants up & runing .
