Beetroot gets a place under the beans

Peter Norris

May 29, 2016

It may not be so fantastically well connected that on the one hand you consider how the kitchen garden can be reduced just a little because two people eventually can not manage to eat through it all at all - while on the other hand you regularly go and experiment with how to get the most out of every single square footage. But one project is frankly pretty boring, while the other is oddly more fun.

The area under bar beans has always been difficult to use for anything sensible. There is probably not much that can be sown at the same time as the beans, where the young plants can do well in the competition when the beans turn off most of the light. And planting crops where the important thing is leaves and other above-ground goods is just something rattled something - small salads have been tried, for example, did not work.

Therefore, pre-cultivated beets are the most obvious to bet on. Here they are sown in a plug box in late March, and planted out in April - and the leaves are now of such a size that they can capture some of the light that the beans let pass, and where the energy from here can go to a continued (but slower) development of the beets. So beets should probably be made in one form or another - the interesting thing is how the quality is, and whether they, for example, end up being somewhat woody due to the slow development where the beans will probably also swallow most of the water.