Beans

We're coming up to week 6 of Bees 'n Beans - for those of you who were able to plant up at the start of April. Now, if you're in the South, or have particularly enthusiastic beans, you might well be seeing flowering soon, so just a quick reminder of what you're going to need to do when that starts. If your beans aren't that far ahead, then no worries - just remember this for later!

Tasks for (almost) flowering beans:

1) Make sure everything is potted on into the 3L pots provided. This keeps the amount of soil standardised between all experiments, so no plants are getting extra help from access to more nutrients / water than others.

2) Pick your experimental plants! This needs to be done as soon as the first plant looks to be on the verge of flowering (unless you have one really far ahead of all the others, in which case probably don't use that one). The instructions go into detail on how to do this, but basically you will need three plants of the same size / number of stems.

3) Assign your treatments. This needs to be done randomly, which might seem a bit much for your own three plants, but on the wider experiment scale it is important that this is done. The simplest way to do this either by literally pulling names of treatments out of a hat, or better: - Number your plants (1-3) - Pick a treatment. Use a random number generator (I suggest https://www.random.org/) to pick one of the three plants to assign that treatment. Continue until all three are assigned.

4) Get your fleece ready. The bagged plant will need to be covered before the flowers open, so now is a good time to make sure you've got the fleece / netting / etc ready to go.

5) Pick a spot for them in the garden!

I will do another post (possibly a video) about hand-pollination soon, as well.

Radishes

Probably aren't doing very much yet. Don't worry, that's to be expected. They are very small seeds, so while they get going quickly it takes a while for them to get the root system down that the beans have managed, so they tend to get outpaced at this stage.