Make This Your Best Year In The Vegetable Garden

Old May Day is the traditional time to sow runner beans. It’s also the perfect time to add some finishing touches to beds and plots, says Val Bourne

- Val Bourne

Gardeners are born optimists, which is handy, because growing vegetables is a swings-and-roundabouts business. In one season, carrots and parsnips might excel, egged on by consistently warm days and nights, yet onions—which thrive in a damp, cool spring followed by a hot, dry summer —will turn out like marbles. The following year, things could well be reversed.

One thing we are pretty much guaranteed is that, by mid May, the ground will be warm and frosts on the wane. This is one of the reasons why our ancestors held such sway by May Day. The date is misleading, however, because when we adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, 11 days were lost and May Day jumped forward. In Oxfordshire, there is still a tradition of planting runner-bean seeds and other vegetables on Old May Day, about May 12 or 13. This, then, is the perfect time to up your game: order some different seeds, plant mixed rows of leaves, add some flowers. In short, ensure your vegetable garden is more beautiful and more productive than ever.

Make summer plentiful and plant a tripod of climbing beans with a companion planting of lettuces and edible flowers. Many people stick to a favourite heritage variety of red-flowered runner bean, the ones with dark-mottled seeds. Growing these has two major problems, however. Being equatorial plants, these older varieties prefer evenly balanced days and nights, rather than long summer days, so their growth spurts wait for longer nights. They are also heat-sensitive and drop their flowers once night-time temperatures exceed 16ËšC. Recent summers have been getting hotter, so it makes sense to plant white-flowered runner beans, with pale, non-blotched seeds, as these are more tolerant of hotter conditions. If you want to go traditional, sow a mixture of red and white runners. Polestar is an excellent stringless red with plump pods; White Lady is a classic, white-flowered variety.