Learning Curve

A bit of a set back on the French Bean side of things I'm afraid. A few weeks ago I planted some of said beans. I pre-soaked some overnight and but also planted some straight out of the packet. They were all then simply put into compost in their own little cells and watered.

Out of the whole batch only one germinated. Yesterday morning I had a quick poke around and found that the beans had rotted to squidgy white goo. Gutted.

A quick look on the internet seems to suggest that it's quite easy to get French Beans to rot. One suggestion was to add sand to the compost to help drainage.
I suddenly remembered that in the corner of our greenhouse is a bag of sand. Result!
Another suggestion was to try and germinate the beans in the same way as we all did cress at school - in damp kitchen roll.

Something else I have learned is not to use water from a water butt for seeds as it may contain bacteria which could be bad for them. I had been using our water butt for everything I've been growing and not noticed any real problems.

When I arrived home last night I had a quick look at the sand. It seems to be the proper stuff - Horticultural Silver Sand (lime free and all!). So I made a compost/sand mix in a largish pot. The ratio was about 2:1 compost to sand.
I filled about 12-15 cells with the mix, planted a bean in each and misted with tap water - not taking any chances. The beans are also just under the surface, not the 1 inch deep stated on the packet.

As a second part of the learning experiment I took the remainder of the beans (probably about 20) and wrapped them in damp kitchen roll. Then sealed it in a Tupperware box to keep in the moisture, hoping it's not too wet. This is now in the greenhouse as a mini propagator.

So, now it's back to the waiting game although it should be easy to check what's happening with the beans in the kitchen roll.