Garden Bears' World - At the Allotment with Huddlesford

 

Hello everyone!  It's Endon Bear here!

I haven't done a Garden Bears' World post for a while, as we have been busy having small bear adventures but thought you might like to see what happened when Huddlesford came to the allotment for the first time, early last month.

Grizzly and Polar, our human guardians, wanted to lift their second early potatoes, which are a variety called Kestrel.  Being helpful small bears, we offered to help.

While Grizzly cut the grass and Polar watered the runner beans, we started digging out potatoes.  Huddlesford is a slightly larger bear than the rest of us, so he could do more digging and lift bigger potatoes than me.  There were not as many as I remembered us lifting with our humans last year.  Although most of the potatoes were quite a good size, sometimes there were only two or three big ones per plant.

One plant seemed to have just one very, very big potato!  We bears dug around to see if there were any more, then Polar searched, but there was only one.

With help from our humans, we cleared both beds of Kestrel potatoes.  Although we were slightly disappointed at the number of potatoes this year, at least they were all free of slug-holes and disease, and should store for use all through the autumn and early winter.

There was a light shower after we had lifted the potatoes, so we sheltered under Polar's gardening sunhat.  This is a very special hat, as she got it many years ago, on a visit to a farm in Vietnam.

It makes a very comfortable bear seat when the sun comes out again!

Huddlesford and I checked on the onions (which were almost ready to harvest then, and have now been lifted) and the runner beans.  These were grown from the beans we saved from growing our friend Chomper B's "Magic Beans" last year.

As you might remember, we divided the beans into four different types and grew them up separate wigwams of beech poles, to see if some produced better beans than others.  On this visit, it was hard to tell, because only the first ones planted had reached the top of their poles and started cropping. 

I will update you on the experiment in another post soon, but it is fair to say that it has been interesting, and our human guardians have rather more runner beans than they need!

But that is all for today's Garden Bears' World !  I will be back soon, and I'm sure Huddlesford, and the other bears, will all be helping me!