How to grow greetings cards from seed: part 2

I promised I would post a photo of my greetings-card runner-bean ‘pots’ when the beans grew, so here they are:

beans growing in greetings cards

The start of this curious use of unwanted greetings cards was documented in a previous post: https://nancyfarmer.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/how-to-grow-greetings-cards-from-seed/… And I have to admit that these may very well be the borlotti beans and not the runner beans after all. Most of the runner beans were actually grown in toilet rolls, which do not make such a pretty picture, but there is something quintessentially English about a row of runner beans in the back garden, so runner beans is what I wanted them to be. I have both. Plus purple French beans and broad beans.

They are nearly all planted in the ground now, greetings-card tube and all, so as not to disturb their sensitive little roots, which was actually the point of doing this, and not just because it was a highly amusing use of my vast surplus of greetings cards, though it was that also. For most of them I did actually remember to remove the elastic bands before I planted them too :-D.

And, because this is a short post, and I’ve not featured these little characters on my blog before, let me introduce you to the guardians of my runner beans (and probably beans in general), the Runner Bean Fairies, from my series where the Flower Fairies go to seed:

The Flower Fairies go to Seed: Runner Beans

close-up of the Runner Bean Fairies

This afternoon, looking after my exhibition, I was in fact going to tell you about another kind of plant entirely, the Foxglove, both deadly and medicinal, and soon to feature in my poison Flower Fairies paintings. But I got a bit deeply into actual research, wading through a medical treatise written in 1785 – such are the pitfalls of being a bit of a nerdy artist – so that one will have to wait till next time…