Bean bean beans

Mr has planted the first of his young outside. I am a bit worried as they haven't experienced the cold as we've kept them indoors since birth. Maybe they need a blanket?

Anyhow, the runner beans and dwarf beans are now outside coping all on their own. Mr has built the runner beans a couple of cane supports (which are like 1-dimensional tepee's made out of canes. Bear with me as my camera is broken so I have no pics). They seem to be doing well although they look eerily like the horrible bind weed that is threatening to take over the rest of the garden. In fact I have become slightly obsessed by weeds and find myself googling for hours various threats to our "land". In particular I am fascinated by "Japanese Knotweed" that takes a vigilante campaign of three years to get rid of! Mere weedkiller is not enough; you need a three-pronged attack of black bin liners, weedkiller and strong boots to stamp out any new growth. Wow. I've seen this knotweed - a lot of it grows by railway lines (it's a fast grower and helps prevent landslides onto train tracks) - and I can now spot it from a distance of 50 miles.

In fact the last few weeks have been spent waging war on unwanted green beasties in the garden. I've been undecidely un-green using weedkiller (not on the veg mind) to kill off the weeds. Whenever I pop out to check on the plants, I like to utter the odd "Die!" in the direction of the little critters. It seems to work. However I am at a loss to know what to do with the green fly that have infected my blackcurrant plants. (How DARE they). I've wiped them all off and covered the leaves in vegetable oil (as per the guidance in the gardening book). None have come back since I did this a week ago, but the leaves have gone a bit see-through - a bit worrying. And now there are black flies getting stuck in the oil. What is a gardener to do!

This evening I went out to visit the plants and still had my ipod on from the train journey. What a surreal experience to be stroking the onion leaves, yanking out shoots of brambles whilst listening to Bohemian Rhapsody.