Runner Beans - An Observation

The unwinding bit may be down to the birds looking for bugs, just seen this morning two Blue Tits on the Runner Beans and the Runner Beans have been unwound

 

Jee that's some crop @shiney well done! here was me thinking I was inundated with Cucumbers, well I am but not quite on your scale of things.

 

My 'White Lady' have done well again this year.

 

Funny you should mention that...

Known by old folk as the White Lady, local legend tells of a vengeful spirit moving heaven and earth to exact revenge on her murderers.

Some say that she was the daughter of a foreign diplomat, heiress to a small fortune, that she was duped into a sham marriage and killed on her wedding night by her murderous husband and his accomplice lover.

Others say that she was a witness to a kidnapping and that the perpetrators came to silence her, in the dead of night, as she was sleeping.

But, what they all agree on is that her corpse was later taken to a secluded location, butchered and the body parts "disappeared" in the nearby cemetery.

That secluded location is no other than where the Community Garden now stands.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I randomly dropped two handfuls of beans harvested from the Community Garden onto the table and just look at what happened:

 

Other than the chicken pellets, regular watering and weather conducive to runner beans, I believe the spirit of the White Lady must be imparting her will onto the plants and inducing lush growth.




I have eleven plants in total: 5 in containers, 3 in a raised bed and 3 in open ground. No matter where they are planted, they all seem to be producing well.

Picture taken last month (2nd picking)



I have been picking the beans every three to four days. Yesterday was the tenth picking from the eleven plants and I am still getting similar quantities.

This can't all be happy coincidence - the twirling nature of the runner bean vines must definitely have some kind of affinity to spirits whose souls are ill at ease, in particular that of the White Lady.

Why the "White" in White Lady? I think it refers to her white wedding dress or white nightgown she was wearing at the time of her death, depending on which version of the story you believe.

A peculiar phenomenon, very peculiar indeed.

 

I grew Polestar every year for over 20 years (mainly using saved seed, but occasionally buying a packet to produce fresh saved stock for the next few years) but a few years ago they seemed not to crop so well anymore (even from bought seeds), so I started trying some other varieties and found White Lady outperformed them.

But whereas I had no difficulty whatsoever saving Polestar seeds, saving from White Lady has proved more problematic, having difficulty getting them to dry out before going off, plus loads of seeds would split their skins/start sprouting in the pods before they'd dried out.

I've got less than 100 this year.

 

The penultimate picking today.



We've had the opposite experience and have been getting consistently high yields from late August up until now.