This year we got about a bushel of pole beans off one trellis in the garden at Wild Woods Retreat & Farm. That doesn't sound like much of a headline, until you know it took us two failed years to get there.
The first two times we tried pole beans, the chickens found the seedlings before they had a chance to establish and ate them down to nothing. About 30 free-range chickens have the run of the pasture here, which is good for the chickens and bad for a bed of new bean seedlings with no protection. This year we put a simple knee-high fence around the bed. That was apparently the whole problem, because the beans finally took off.
The trellis itself is a tipi built from last year's dried weed stalks, tied together with twine, nothing bought or fancy. We laid black landscape plastic underneath the bed first, so it wouldn't fill in with grass the way garden beds here tend to. Between the fence, the tipi, and the plastic, the beans climbed all season and gave us close to a bushel.
None of this worked on the first attempt, and we're not pretending it did. That's fairly normal for a working farm: you try something, it fails for a specific, identifiable reason, you fix that one thing, and the next year it works better. Next year we expect the bed to do even more, now that we know what it actually needs.
If you want to see what's growing in the garden during your stay, it changes by the week. Book your stay at wildwoodsretreat.com.
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