As with so many people today, my wife and I have a small garden of a size that precludes the growing of vegetables in the traditional sense. Since we reached the decision to downsize shortly before what we considered to be the inevitable credit crunch, we have been limited to growing nothing more than a few tomatoes in pots while buying as much of our fruit and veg as possible from a neighbouring allotment holder or failing that, our local farm shop.

But apparently designed with people like us in mind, this year has seen a plethora of ingenious container solutions come on to the market which would seem to make it possible for those of us with small gardens to grow at least some of our own fruit and veg. Bottom line – we’ve decided to trial a few, starting with the Bosmere Reusable Runner Bean Bag, in one of which we will be growing runner beans and another French beans.

In our last house we used to grow our runner beans on a pergola that ran the full length of the side of our house. Unusual perhaps, but highly effective and far from being unsightly, our runner bean crop used to add a certain warmth and character to the rural property. A bit like the added attractiveness of hanging baskets on the front of the property to take away some of its structual blandness.

Siting a plant alongside each of the timber uprights and training them on wires stretched the length of the pergola, by the time our runner bean crop was ready to harvest, picking them was simplicity itself since the crop was to the side of us and above us as we walked beneath the pergola. Even when the lower runners had been harvested, a small set of steps was sufficient to comfortably reach the rest of the crop either to the side of us between the uprights or dangling tantalizingly above our heads.

Sadly, our current property doesn’t offer us quite the same facility. Even if we added a pergola to the side of the house, instead of abutting the openness of our side garden as did the pergola on our previous property, on this occasion it would simply abut our neighbours fence, making the narrow corridor between our house and the fence too dark to effectively grow our runner bean crop.

However, if container gardening it has to be for us from now on, the Bosmere Reusable Runner Bean Bag is not an inelegant solution. Dark green and made from high quality polythene with draining holes, “U.V. stabilised for longer life,” according to the label, it accepts 10 runner bean plants and the only other thing we needed to buy were the 10 x 8′ canes and the growing medium. We used a 75-litre bag of multi-purpose compost. It comes complete with its own ‘Sweet Pea & Bean Ring’ into which the canes sit at the top to avoid the necessity of tying your canes together and, again according to the label, should crop for a number of weeks from one bag.

Our ‘wipe clean’ Bosmere Reusable Runner Bean Bag is ideal for patio or small garden use and should hopefully provide us with at least part of our runner bean and French bean requirement this year, and we’ll be reporting later in the year on the results.

Watch this space!

Editor, Third Age.

Update: The picture bottom right of the page shows our Runner Beans after 3 weeks.