With summer well and truly over and winter on the horizon, my thoughts start to turn to the 2018 growing season. I won’t be buying seeds for a while yet (although I plant my peppers and chillies as early as January, so that job is not too far away), but today I have been ensuring I have seeds for at least one crop next year.

One of this year’s big successes was climbing French beans. The original plants were destroyed by strong winds, and one of my friends came to the rescue with some spare plants that were just ready for transplanting (thank you Ann). I have completely forgotten what variety they are, but they produced delicious tender beans in abundance over a long season. Knowing how much we enjoyed them, I left some beans on the plants to mature and today I collected some of the drier pods from which to take the seeds to be saved:

pods collected before they get washed away or rotted!

Over morning coffee, Mr Snail and I extracted the seeds and now they just need to be spread out to dry. So, that’s the first of next year’s bounty sorted… and not a penny spent.

bean futures

What’s more, there are still quite a lot of pods to harvest, so I think tomorrow we will have Boston beans made, unusually, with freshly shelled beans (no soaking required).