2025 Little Easy Bean Network - Growers Of The Future Will Be Glad We Saved

heirloomgal · 2025-07-07T23:12:34-0500

flowerbug said:
new shingles? perhaps a bit of a concern at first but after they've been on for a while and through some rains that doesn't bother me. i'm sure we get a lot more contamination from things brought in on the winds (dusts from farm fields and various sprays).

If there had been a long hot and dry spell and you took the rain off the roof and put that in the rain barrels instead of letting it bypass it could be an issue, but with older shingles that have been weathered enough it would not concern me at all. bird poo is fertilizer they provide it all the time very directly in the gardens here. the water rejecting gadgets are more for people who use their roof runoff for drinking water (which i don't think is very common in the USoA).

No, they've been there for a decade I think. But what got me thinking about the rain barrels was a few years ago I noticed by chance, and at a certain angle that characteristic 'rainbow' sheen of drop of gas on water in one of them. And I mentioned to DH that maybe the barrels got contaminated somehow? And it was he that mentioned the shingles and the runoff. It wasn't much, and you couldn't even really see the sheen if the sun wasn't catching it just the right way, but for small plants I wonder if there may be an influence from something like that.

heirloomgal · 2025-07-07T23:38:29-0500

Will do a photo dump of the network beans so you can see how they're all doing. This is a mixture of the 2024 ones that were fails as well as the 2025 ones. Might take a couple days to get through them all. The variation in heights is a bit mind boggling! Most of them are just starting to climb, and there are a couple way out in the margins that are either super tall or still looking pokey.

The rabbit ate most of my Stibitz plants. :somad