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Beans for eating and for beauty too can
be grown up the side of the house as an easy annual climber. Instead of
using sticks, let them grow up strings attached to screw-eyes set in a
row of Rawlplugs ten to twelve feet high on the wall.
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The old-fashioned 'screen bean' is
'Painted Lady', and it has long been used to hide unsightly fences or
sheds with its plentiful foliage and scarlet and white blossom. Its
pods are ordinary runner beans. Those of the all-scarlet-flowered
'Giraffe' are two feet long when fully grown and at a foot length are
still without tough fibers down their backs.
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'Blue Coco' offers purple flowers and
violet French-bean-type pods that cook to normal green, and `Du Pape',
the climbing pea bean, has pale pink blossoms and fat round pods that
will shell like peas or slice like beans. This has been called our most
delicious bean, especially when young and topped and tailed and cooked
whole like sugar peas. It often suffers from too deep sowing. Sow only
half an inch deep, not two inches like the other beans, so that it has
a good start in sun-warmed soil.
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Beans grown up a wall need only a narrow
bed. Dig compost or rotted manure deeply into it, sowing six inches
apart and six inches from the wall. A quarter-pint packet does about
fifty feet and seed will keep a second season. Sow in May or June: and
a row of French marigolds could go along the border for a long-lasting
blaze of yellow or orange to contrast with the colors above.
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Metal skewers hold the lower ends of the
climbing strings. These should be of tomato string to take t he weight
and to turn into compost with the cut-down foliage in autumn. Beds by
walls arc often dry, but watering with cold water straight from the
mains will make beans drop blossom, so take the chill off the water.
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'Hammond's Dwarf Scarlet', the new 'bush
runner bean' needs tying to sturdy canes about two feet tall to keep
the crop clear of soil and slugs, for, like bush tomatoes, their stems
will not stand the weight. Sow them eight inches apart and two feet
between rows to allow picking space.
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The best supports for ordinary runner
beans since the passing of the gypsy type with a horse and Vail who
fetched beansticks from the woods, is the six- to eight-foot bamboo
cane. Tie three in a tripod at each end of the row, tie the others in
'Ws' and set two, point upwards, towards the middle, and tie a couple
along the top as in the diagram. Then tie in the rest and sow the seeds
beside each cane.
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These should be two feet apart at the
bottom, and if you have more than a single row have a three-foot gap
between, which can be mulched with grass mowing to keep down weeds.
There are a number of modern metal devices for supporting runner beans,
but their problem is that they are far more expensive than bamboo, less
easy to store in winter, and the stems do not get a grip on the
plastic-covered wires.
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The yield from runner beans depends on
how often they are picked, but a fair average is 750 lb. of pods from
half a pint of seeds, so very few families need more than a single row.