French and broad bean help

[Newbiegrower1970]

I planted some dwarf french beans with coke bottle cloches about a week ago. They are now sprouting, should I remove the cloches or leave them as it's meant to get cold here next week?

My broad beans are flowering but they are covered in ants, will that harm them?
Many thanks

[Snoop Puss]

French beans don't do well in very chilly conditions. Some are OK down to 5 ºC but others need quite a bit more. How cold is cold? You might get away with uncovering them in the daytime and covering them at night. I must admit I grow my first ones in modules so that they can sleep indoors at night.

As for the broad beans, the ants themselves are not a problem but are interested in harvesting honeydew produced by blackfly. Check to see if you have blackfly and deal with as appropriate. Lots of people remove the growing tips off broad beans to try and keep blackfly in check. But I often get blackfly on my broad beans when the plants are still quite small, so I squish them between my fingers. I have thought about giving the plants a good spray with water to wash them off, but I can never quite bring myself to do it because I don't want the plants to develop fungal problems.

[Nicos]

Gosh!...the French beans won't like the cold at all....can you cover them in newspaper and fleece at night?
Might work...depends on how cold 'cold' actually is.

[Scarlet]

You may lose those french beans if we get a serious cold snap, it's very early for french beans outdoors. They really don't like getting cold. I also start off an early crop in the GH in modules. Start off some more just incase, i usually plant a bean and a plant at the same pole, so you could just put a few seeds in next to your plants in a couple of weeks as back up.

[Twynyrodyn]

I found ants crawling all over my broad bean seedlings but no blackfly. I sprinkled ground cloves on the leaves and that got rid of the ants. I read somewhere that ants hate oil of cloves but I didn't have that so I improvised.