Garden Bears' World - Full of Beans!

We bears have had a New Year's Day surprise from Polar, who has given us our own little computer!  It's the one she was using for work, until her boss brought her one from work just for doing work things.  

This little one was supposed to have been for taking on Uppie so she could do some writing in the evenings, but of course we haven't been away on Uppie very much.

I am going to let Endon use it first, to catch up on his Garden Bears' World posts, so here he is...

Hello everyone!  It has been too wet to do very much in the garden recently but one job I could help with, earlier this month, was sorting out the seed beans from the pods we saved from the big runner bean plants grown from our friend Chomper's seeds.

The original beans had all looked like very big but typical runner bean seeds - a violet-pink colour with purple-black markings - rather like these.

However, our seed beans came in five quite different colourings.  As well as the violet and black patterned ones, there were some bigger beans with a paler background, and some with much less black on them.

Then there were a very small number of beans with dark markings but a white background and some pure white beans, although most of these seemed to be in pods that had started to go mouldy, so we only saved two of each of these.  I hope they grow, as I think these are extremely magical beans.

I am hoping we can do some proper plant science next year and grow a few of each type, to see if they produce noticeably different plants.  I'm sure Hanley Bear will want to help.  We can see which germinate best, which make the strongest plants, whether the flowers are all the same and - most important of all - which produce the best crop of beans! 

Polar and I sorted them into envelopes, taking out any that looked damaged or diseased and labelling the envelopes so we know which beans are in which.  As long as they have a reasonable germination rate, we will have more than we need - and there are still some in the greenhouse on the allotment!

We have most of the slightly smaller, darker beans at the moment.  Polar says you can cook and eat them, but usually she doesn't have enough to do this.  Maybe we will try this winter?

Once we had sorted and labelled them, we put the beans away in Polar's seed box.  It is a filing box which has separate compartments for each month of the year, making it easy to see what we should sow in each month.

There seems to be lots to plant in April now we have added our beans!

Happy New Year, everyone!  Let's hope we all have lots of gardening success in 2021!