Tender plants are those which won't withstand cold weather and can only be planted out once all risk of frost has passed. These include things such as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, courgettes, pumpkins, sweetcorn, and French and runner beans.
Enthusiatic newcomers to gardening have the tendency to sow seeds too early in the year and end up with plants that are ready to go into the garden before the weather is good enough to plant them out. Then they struggle to keep the plants in sufficiently large flower pots and in bright enough conditions until the weather warms up. So, either the plants suffer indoors or the gardener decides to plant things out anyway and the good ol' British weather serves up a fierce hailstorm or an overnight frost right at the end of spring.
So, the upshot is, take your time. April is a great month to start seeds off indoors but don't feel you have to get them all sown by the weekend. Get tomatoes and peppers sown if you haven't already, then move to sweetcorn, cucurbits, brassicas and beans. You have all of May to go yet before you can plant out so there is time for plants to grow and some of these will romp away.
If you are thinking about growing beans this season, then you might want to consider sowing some broad beans now. You can start these off in pots indoors or, at this time of year, you can sow them directly into the soil. I save plastic bottles for occasions such as these, and cut off the bottoms so that I can place one bottle over the top of each seed to give them their own mini greenhouse to protect them from the worst of the weather. If, instead, you are starting them off in pots indoors, you can plant them out in a few weeks when they are a few centimeters tall and, again, a bottle cloche over the top helps to protect the seedling from the weather and slugs.
Remove the cloche once the seedling has grow to the top of it. In a few weeks, the plants will flower; a lovely black and white flower with a strong scent. You can also buy crimson flowered broad beans, which look very attractive in the garden. Broad beans can suffer quite badly with black fly so it is worth removing the growing tips of the plants once they start to flower as this seems to reduce the black fly infestation. Once the flowers fade, bean pods start to form. The pods can get quite long and fat well before the beans inside have grown to an edible size so it well worth giving them a good squeeze before you pick them, and it is even worth splitting one open to check the bean size inside before picking any more.
Broad bean pods are like lovely furry sleeping bags with the beans nestling cosily inside. At first the beans will be quite small, with tender shells and little green hats. As the season progresses, the beans become tougher skinned and the hats fall off to reveal a black scar. The young, tender beans are delicious, the older black scar beans less so. As such, I would recommend picking and eating broad beans quite quickly to try to eat them all before they become tough. If they do become tough then you can remove the skin after cooking but it is fiddly.
Broad beans also freeze well so you may want to freeze young broad beans rather than have them go over. Interestingly, the pods of broad beans make some people's hands turn black when shelling them, whilst other people are unaffected. It's just a genetic thing but if your hands go black you might like to wear disposably gloves whilst podding the beans.
Runner beans are another popular bean to grow at home but, unlike the broad bean, they can't be sown outside just yet. They can, however, be started in the greenhouse now and planted out at the beginning of June. Runner beans are also a fantastic thing to grow in a jar of damp cotton wool to show children the wonders of germination.
The biggest problem with runner beans in my opinion is their stringiness. They can have pods like razor blades and have awful strings of tough pod when you try to eat them. Look out for so called "stringless" varieties and try to pick the pods when still quite small to minimize this problem.
Better still, I would recommend growing French beans instead. These suffer much less of the stringiness problem and have a great flavour too. You can get dwarf varieties, which are handy in small spaces or containers and provide a crop earlier than the climbing varieties too. The climbing varieties have high yields and are an attractive plant, with pretty flowers followed by elegant pods. You can get green, yellow and purple podded varieties and they have different shades of flower too (although I have to admit none are quite a pretty as red flowering runner beans!). You can also get flat podded varieties.
It is important to pick the beans regularly during the cropping period as they will stop cropping as soon as they have managed to form mature beans. Towards the end of the season, you can leave some to mature fully and these beans can be podded and the beans inside can be eaten as haricot beans, or dried and stored over winter. The plants will be killed by the frosts so the end of the season is around October.
You may also like to consider growing borlotti beans, which grow in the same way and need the same care and attention as dwarf French beans. They are best left to mature to eat the beans inside rather than the pods. You can also, these days, buy soya beans suitable for growing in the UK and these can be grown in the same way as other beans. Once mature, you can cook the beans in their pods and then pop the beans out and directly into your mouth. These are edamame beans and they go particularly well in asian dishes or in salads.
With so many varieties of beans to choose from, I would definitely recommend finding space for a least some of them in your vegetable garden.
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