I bought carrot seeds, beetroot seeds and runner bean seeds. I didn't plant up until the first week of June and following the instructions on the packets I planted carrots and beetroot outdoors and within 24 hours of planting the seeds we had nothing but rain for a couple of weeks, a lot heavy rain. The runner beans had to be sowed indoors and they were growing quickly. I transported them outdoors and planted them in their growing place.
Some of the carrots started to sprout, but not many and the beetroot were a total no show. I left it a few weeks but still nothing so I planted more seeds, thinking that maybe the first lot had been washed away with the sheer amount of rain we had had. I kept looking in hope and eventually we had a few little leaves appear in a few places and out of about 300 seeds planted I counted about 40 tiny seedlings. They were doing OK for about a week and then all of a sudden they just disappeared and not a single beetroot was grown and harvested this year. I love fresh beetroot and I was devastated, given the glut of beetroot harvest we've had the past two years.
We didn't fair too well with the carrots either this year, I had to plant additional carrot seeds where there were large gaps where they just didn't germinate but we've not exactly had brilliant weather this year, its been quite wet, or at least that's what it seems to have been. One thing we did do with the carrots this year though, and that was to get nice straight carrots! I did make more carrot top dye again this year and I used it to dye some Jacobs fleece.
As for the beans, they went totally mad and I was harvesting huge amounts of beans every couple of days. I'm not kidding, take a look at the photos, that is the same pile of beans from two different angles and that was the biggest single harvest but every couple of days I was harvesting half to thirds of that amount each time. The freezer was full of bags of sliced, blanched runner beans.
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