Kitchen Garden Forum

i have planted my broad beans out after sowing them in 3in pots. something nasty has cut them off at ground level leaving the top on the surface. any ideas what did this and how can i deal with it?

Sounds like mice. If so I can't offer any advice on what to do. We garden in a field full of voles and I simply stopped growing broad beans.
The voles are no problem otherwise, except for nibbling the odd potato underground. Their best trick this winter has been to burrow up into the polytunnel and eat just one out of about twenty clumps of parsley.

Alan

Were the beans still there and have they disappeared? I reckoned it was jackdaws when it happened to me. I now put a fleece fence round them while they establish.

I'd forgotten about the jackdaws, Geoff. Now I recall I lost a whole bed of field beans sown as green manure a few years ago. That was certainly jackdaws as I saw them doing it. However, these were emerging seedlings and the jackdaws were indeed after the beans. I'm not sure in the case of (presumably quite large) planted-out beans.

Alan

We've had both mice and jackdaws attacking broad beans in the past but the result is quite different. When it's mice, they have actually taken the "spent" seed and, when biting it off, have severed the stem, but jackdaws tug at the whole plant, so quite often the roots are pulled out as well and the leaves are sort of scattered about. Nowadays, we put wire netting over the beans when they are first planted and then (when all the broad beans and peas are in the bed, we have a sort of fruit cage over the lot because otherwise the jackdaws eat the ripe peas and beans by ripping open the pods. The trouble is usually worse in very dry weather.

thanks to you all for your help. from the advice it seems to be mice, but it's the first time in many years that this has happened