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For those of you who recall my pleas for help in dealing with mice eating all my broad bean plants ( well the beans anyway, leaving the plants dead on the ground !!), I can report a minor success. I grew some new plants in pots and planted them out when they were large enough for the beans to have gone past the mice attraction stage - this worked but has resulted in late plants, now more succeptable to blackfly of course !!

However, I also experimented with my runner bean seeds, with some pot grown plants (as usual so no great change there) which the mice were not interested in, and my new "mice resistant" seed planter. This is a sheet of wire mesh, across the bean trench just below the beans, which curves up the side of the top of the trench and over the top of the bean. The planter is filled with compost/soil, the seeds planted within the protected edge strip and the whole think covered with compost and soil. The mice had a go at it (witness one or two holes, but not down to the beans) and eureka !! I have some bean plants growing from the seeds. Now does this mean I have a potential broad bean planter for next year or is it just that mice do not like runner bean seeds.....

akey breaky

Well done akey breaky, these things are sent to try us, so a sucess always feels good. .

I have given up with the broard beans. It doesn't seem to matter when I plant them they always just seem to get to the flowering part and then become swamped in blackfly

Oh the woes of being a gardener, the mice eat everything before they even get out of the ground, the slugs eat them when they first appear and then the birds and squirrels eat everything just when you think something has survived and you might get a look in.
However if you have trouble with blackfly - plant nasturiums. Occaisionally I get some blackfly on my early beans, before the nasturiums are up (these can be jetted off once and then they don't seem to reappear), but once the nasturiums are up they usually divert all the blackfly away from your beans. It definitely works for me and they also divert the cabbage white butterfly from your brassicas.