While all the garden battles the heat and the summer veg are doing their best just to get properly established, some dainty delights are peeking from their hiding places. To my surprise, this Sunset runner bean is the first to flower (I rarely have much luck with her and have always found her sister the Scarlet runner to be more hardy). Perhaps I’ve finally discovered her trick and very much hope she may produce a few beans for Christmas Day. I think her shell-pink flower is quite delectable, hugging the bamboo pole as her tendrils twine ever higher.
Since putting in the beehives last year, I’ve felt more inclined than ever to allow a good number of veg to flower, which makes them into excellent companion plants, bringing in good bugs and providing pollen for the bees. I was doing it before with one or two, in order to collect seed, but I’ve long since recognised this is such a delightful way to enjoy a meadow-like haze in the garden and to discover hitherto unrecognised scent wafting all about. Have you ever enjoyed the quite breathtaking perfume of a carrot flower? It’s like wild honey!
If you’ve been following my blog posts for awhile, (or indeed visited Glenmore) you will know about my mild obsession with fennel flowers…. it began simply enough, when I left a few bulbs to go to flower so I could save their seed, then one year I scattered the seed in the companion beds under the apple arch and well, the rest is history!
They’ve been perfect for weeks on end now, their clouds of flowers on tall stems swaying in the breeze and each at a different stage of development. Some, like this one, are still at the new pollen stage, while others have developed their succulent budlets that I add to every leaf salad, baby potato, roast chicken, fish….almost nothing escapes being sprinkled with their juicy, immature seed, that pops with aniseed flavour! Most of the day, the flowers are humming with bees and covered in all kinds of insects, from ladybirds to hover-flies. They are good companions indeed and I’ll leave them to grow through their full cycle, so I can collect their seed and begin the process all over again.