my broad beans which are about 12" tall are not looking to good it's mainly the top few leaves they are king of curled up, any ideas as to what would cause this. :)
Have you checked for Blackfly?
Have you had any rain recently?
Either can make the tips limp.... :-\
not seen any fly on them i'll have a closer look , the leaves don't feel limp at all they are sort of tightly curled up i'll go and take a few pic's
Weedkiller spray drift?
Have you uncurled the leaves to see if there are black flies inside? You can pinch out the tips and compost the evidence :)
just had another look at them and there is no sign of any flies i did check inside the curled up leaves none there either, here is a pic of them.
http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/5290/img0271p.jpg
http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/3131/img0273i.jpg
The first picture looks OK to me but the second picture looks as if the growing tip has aborted.
This hot weather might have played its part...monitor them for the next few days and see what happens.
I would say it is too early to cut the tip off at this stage as you appear to have only a couple of flower trusses.
If the tops get worse then taking them of will be an option and you will get a few beans from those few flowers.
Personally I would not rush into things!
Has the ground had manure that may be contiminated by aminopyralid. Some of our beans have been affected and look similar to yours in the photo? check this link if you haven't already checked this out before.http://www.manurematters.co.uk/gardening.htm#my_plants_affected
now i'm getting worried the beans were manured , i've had 2 lots of manure one is already on most of the beds and everything looks ok including potato's
the second lot i've hardly touched apart from the beans and a few plants in the polytunnel ,the reason i'm getting worried is i made a post acouple of days ago about one of my tomato plants that looked like it was scorched, the one next to it is looking a bit strange both of these have had manure from the second batch, here is a picture of it.
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/6920/img0276t.jpg
Staris - sorry to hear that, looks like it could be the manure. We have had the same problem - some old manure on the beds has given no problems - another lot of manure has caused beans / potatoes to wither on a few of the plots. From what I read the herbicide will wash out over the coming months and the produce is supposedly safe to eat.
There was quite a lot of complaint about the problem with contaminated manure last year....
A third of my raised beds are contaminated - just gonna grow brassicas on them as they dont seem to be affected by the chemical.. ::)
the manure was from the same farm and only about 2 months in between loads ,i'm hoping it's not affected i've got about 8 ton sitting there, is it not possible that the manure was a bit fresh and damaged the plants ?
did you do a test on the manure archiesdad ?
No, we didn't test it. The contaminated manure is nearly all gone now so we will just be more careful where we get it from next time.
I think the advice is to dig the contaminted beds over several times before autumn so the herbicide can be broken down. Should be ok next year. It can take a couple of years for the herbicide to wash out of the contaminated manure so leave it to one side unless you can send it back to where it came from.....
i'm not exactly sure which manure went where but i do know about one half of my polytunnel has got it :(