Grow Your Own – Alas, Poor Stringbean; I Knew Him, Horatio…
by John Weckerle
In a tragedy of not exactly Shakespearian proportions, we must finally accept the fate of the string beans we’ve been attempting to grow in the plant room. They appear to have succumbed to pests, or at least very nearly succumbed. This is too bad, as they had actually produced a few string beans. We believe the culprits to be fungus gnats and perhaps some odd-looking creature that appears occasionally on the undersides of the leaves – but only on the pea/bean contingent (the snow peas appear to have bounced back from this). This is not our first abortive attempt at indoor string bean cultivation; we had similar problems last year. While the fungus gnats don’t seem to damage anything else, string beans seem unusually susceptible. We’ll give it another shot soon. The lettuce is doing nicely, and has produced leaves for a few sandwiches already.
The squash started out weak and ended dead, but everything else is looking good. The hanging tomatoes have adapted well to their suspended existence, and I’m saving up milk jugs for another round. The zinnias, petunias, impatiens, and coreopsis have all begun to sprout. The petunias are an interesting case – the seeds are so small they’re almost like dust, and as a result there are probably a hundred sprouts in each of the starter pots; looks like we’ll be doing some thinning. The petunias and impatiens are destined for hanging baskets, the zinnias for pots, and the coreopsis for pots and possibly some in-ground planting. Cosmos will be among the next wave of flower sprouting.
Unfortunately, yesterday’s winds blew the access cover off the mini-greenhouse. The Velcro actually separated from the plastic on the cover, and stayed attached to the main body of plastic. There are two potential fixes: a lot more Velcro, or fastening the cover underneath the hole instead of on top of it.