Runner Beans & Toilet Training

By Steve Jones - 23/01/2007

Toilet roll manufacturers have spent millions of pounds and years of
research trying to find a way to get rid of the middle of toilet rolls.

Expensive transportation and shelf space is taken up with the holes in the
middle, but I've now found a use for the little cardboard tubes: you can grow runner beans in them!

 

Runner beans are about the only things I had ever grown before taking
over my allotment earlier this year and I had always bought them from a garden centre. But this year I collected empty toilet rolls from friends and family and was able to grow a lovely set of runner beans after reading a suggestion from organic guru Bob Flowerdew. Runner beans have long roots, even when young seedlings, and don't like having them disturbed when you plant them.

 

Toilet rolls allow the long roots to grow and you can then plant the toilet rolls directly into the ground where they biodegrade as the runner beans grow.

 

Or at least that is the theory! I carefully moved my inherited bean poles to
a new patch of the allotment and proudly planted my 30 ten inch high plants
(and toilet rolls) into compost, watered  them and stepped back, a proud man.

After a couple of days of rain I returned to find the toilet rolls but no sign of the plants. After discounting theft from my fellow allotment holders I saw the culprits, a whole army of young slugs racing away from the scene of devastation.

 

Trying to remain politically correct I bought further supplies of beans from
my local garden centre (unfortunately without the benefit of having been
grown in my old toilet rolls), replanted the beans and surrounded them with
piles of sand, “a guaranteed way of stopping slugs attacking your plants”.
But not on my allotment; whether they used pogo sticks, gliders or just vaulted the sand I don't know, but the second planting disappeared just as quickly.

 

Now I reverted to the final weapon in the organic gardener's armoury, biological warfare! I ordered a tray of nematodes, 30 million tiny parasitic worms which invade the slug, laying eggs which then eat the slug away from inside.

 

Within three days they stop feeding and they all die within 10 days. Not long ago I would have gone on a coach to London, marched through the streets with thousands of other young people before listening to Tony Benn in Trafalgar Square denouncing biological warfare; now I sprayed the tiny worms across the allotment with no shred of conscience.

 

Five days later I went to plant my third set of runner beans and found my
intrepid slugs to have escaped the organic gardeners' most vicious
onslaught. Possibly they have their equivalent of nuclear fallout shelters;
maybe they were visiting friends on other plots; but the worms had failed.

 

I have now planted my beans and sprinkled slug pellets across the allotment - not very green I know but my plants are growing. The pellets do biodegrade and don't harm animals and birds but my attempts at organic gardening are being severely strained.

 

However, things are now starting to appear out of the soil: my leeks now
look like recently sown grass; beetroot is showing through; and I have had the first strawberry, only just red but wonderful.

 

The allotment also seems to give free reign to the English imagination and
desire to recycle. A whole range of Heath Robinson structures are now arising on the allotments. Children's climbing frames and small sticks cobbled together with string are joining the traditional cane sticks for beans.

 

All those old window frames removed and replaced by upvc are appearing around me as small greenhouses, held together again with old bits of string and providing extra warmth for tomatoes and other plants. You can also now tell the allotments rented to women: they're tidier with little flourishes of plants missing from the more butch and messy men's allotments.

 

If the sun shines this month my spinach, carrots, lettuces, sweetcorn,
French beans may also make an appearance.

It is still backbreaking and one strawberry and a lettuce is not much of
a payback, but I keep telling my wife, “just you wait and see.” We have decided against keeping rabbits on the allotment; but a friend is bringing his three chickens to the allotment.

 

Delicious fresh eggs and the chickens just love eating slugs...