A hill of beans. Well, a handful at least. I sowed a selection of Runner Beans (Phaseoulus coccineus) in pots for planting out on the allotment later in the month. Beans seem to benefit from being started in pots rather than direct sowing.
 The soil needs to be fairly warm -about 10C- to germinate so I improvised a propagator: an ancient folding workbench, a couple of plastic crates and a sheet of glass from a long gone bookcase.
 The phrase "hill of beans" is generally taken to mean something of trifling importance which isn't really the case at all where beans are concerned.

 I sowed three varieties of P. coccineus. The speckled purplish beans are Scarlet Emperor, widely regarded as one of the best and first recorded in cultivation in 1633! The flowers are very scarlet indeed.
 The white beans are a white flowered variety. Appropriately they are called White Lady. I see that the Royal Horticultural Society has awarded them their AGM (Award of Garden Merit). The RHS website also notes that they have PBR (Plant Breeders' Rights). This is a form of copyright when a grower develops a distinctively new cultivar, although there is a certain amount of controversy among horticulturalists as to when and how this should be applied.
 The small black beans at the back of the plate are known as Trail of Tears and were given to me by my brother recently. They have a fascinating though grim history. They are sometimes known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears and were indeed a staple food source of that tribe.
 In 1838 the Cherokee Nation were forced to relocate from their ancestral homelands in Georgia to a reservation in Oklahoma over a thousand miles away to make way for agriculture and gold prospecting. Over ten thousand souls were marched at gunpoint in the harshest of winters and thousands died. They took with them such possessions as they could carry including a quantity of these beans. That long and deadly journey was the Trail of Tears which gives the beans their name.
 I have watched a video posted by a gardener in Oklahoma who grows Trail of Tears. He mentions that he got his from a seed exchange where they were donated by a descendant of those Cherokee. Almost two hundred years later we can grow them still. And think of the sentiment that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.