green beans

[rockriver]

aka snap beans.

on march 22 i helped a nice little lady plant some green beans. she calls them blue lakes.
i guess that is a brand name.
i measured the row about 35 feet long. i don't recall seed spacing. but from the plants it looks like every 3 inches.

they are loaded. today for the first time we picked them and got more than a 5 gallon bucket.
i don't know how long they will produce. we left a lot on the bushes.
compared to some beans we won't shell them. the whole bean goes in the pot
(or a quart jar or the freezer)

so a small hand ful of seeds ( and a little 10-10-10 ) have produced a lot of beans...
there were deer tracks in the garden, but no obvious dmg to the green beans. that's one good reason
that we will try them again next year.
the little lady said we should have already picked them as the beans are better when they are smaller.
most of what we gathered was about 6 inches long.
i'm thinking it's better to have a bigger bean. fills the pot and fills my hungry stomach.

looking for comments on how you plant green beans. varieties? how you put them up?
which brands are good for certain parts of the country. which brands are the hardiest...
and take the heat/no water/late freezes/etc.. the best.
and which ones produce the longest period of time??

as i helped snap them, i kept remembering that i didn't like doing this when i was a kid.
somehow my fingers remembered.
--
i also got this strong idea that it took me a long time to get around to doing a garden.

maybe that means i didn't really believe we were heading for hard times.

i had and still have a couple of sealed #10 cans with seeds in them.
but only did minimal gardening for the last few years.

[Benn Gleck]

Blue lake green beans are a bush bean variety. We have grown them along with Top Crop bush beans.

They're both good eatin but my family prefers half runners or pole beans for flavor. Half runners are string beans, meaning you have to break them and pull the strings out of the 'spine" of the pod. I suppose it is more work but its worth it to us.

I have fond memories from my childhood of sitting in the porch swing with my grandma stringing beans although I'm sure she had to go back through and string the ones I missed.

We grow half runners in a row on a 3' to 4' high fence to give them something to climb (run) on.
Pole beans are also string beans and my favorite green bean because I think they have the most flavor. We grow them by making a teepee af sticks 6' to 7' high and planting 6 or 7 seeds arond each pole. The beans climb the pole and produce a large crop of very flavorful beans. As a kid you could play in the teepees..... just don't let Mom Cox catch ya. ;)

RR, your wife and mine sound a lot alike when talking about green beans, when picking beans she always picks the young ones and I like them to fill out and get a bean in them. Thats another thing about pole beans, they are best if you let them develop a large bean in them.
The variety of pole bean we grow has been handed down through my family for many years and produces a very large pod which was good for poor families with a lot of kids. My grandparents were sharecroppers in Kentucky during the depression, they had 13 kids so you know they had to have a huge garden.

[goatlady]

Blue Lake green beans are THE premier canning bean - does not go mushy, keeps color and flavor. It can be grown as a bush bean or the original pole bean, both types are available. The main differene is the bush variety pretty much sets the crop within a set time all at once so to speak whereas the pole variety keep producing as you pick, but you have to pick a couple of days usually to get a canner full to process. I prefer getting my bean canning done all at once rather than spaced out over weeks. You can also plant the bush variety several times, depending on your growing area, and have a double or even triple crop spaced out over the entire summer - they grow and produce faster than the pole variety. All depends on what works for you. I can plant 152 Blue Lake seeds in a 4x4 bed and harvest 35+ pounds of prime beans which gives me 7-10 quarts plus fresh eating. I can plant 3 different times in my climate which for the year give me plenty of green beans to eat and store. Bigger bean pods are not necessarily better as the bigger the pod the tougher the fibers and the stronger the flavor and more difficult to digest and the longer the cooking time needed. The young and tender 4" pods are prime eating lightly sauteed in butter with a sprinkle of garlic or even raw in a salad or as a "dipper" in sauces. I personally have better things to do with my time besides pulling strings off of "over ripe" pole beans. Bush beans don't have any strings! But everybody is different.

[rockriver]

ms. Lady,
i was voting for quantity, weight and bulk
my little lady friend... doesn't know all that you just typed, but she
will sure be happy when i tell her of your "smaller is better" story.
multiple planting dates... !!

all,
thanks for the info.

[kappydell]

blue lakes are an excellent canning and freezing bush bean. in my area the bush beans stop producing in the summer heat, so I plant rows of pole beans also. The pole beans start later, but keep going and going until frost, once they get started. They are also easier to pick for me now that bending down is getting harder. Pole beans are a little harder to find, and less varied due to decreased popularity. I guess folks find the poles a hassle. I have grown pole beans in large pots with a tripod of 6 ft. bamboo poles for supporting them. Only problem was they would tip over in winds, id have to go out and tip them upright again. They bore very well and prolifically.
I like Kentucky Wonder, an old bean but a good reliable one. They only get stringy if you let them get old. That is when I use them for shelly beans instead (I eat the seeds instead of the pod).

Once you find beans you like, you can save the seeds. They self pollinate so crossing is rare; just let some of the pods dry on the vines then shell them out and keep dry for planting next year.
There are reasons beans are a good survival crop:
1. easy to grow. pole beans bear more in a smaller space to boot.
2. seeds are easy to save. they don't cross pollinate as a rule.
3. You can eat them at the green snap stage, the older shell bean stage, and even dried like the beans you buy in the store. The different kinds differ in their appropriateness for all stages, though, so look around if you can only plant one kind to get a versatile multi-purpose kind.
4. They are easily canned or frozen; can be dehydrated easily even on a string

(Only tomatoes rival green beans in my book as a survival crop because of reasons 1 and 2 above, and they are even easier than green beans to can, and you can make more things of them. )

[Benn Gleck]

Kappy reminded me, I always leave some pole beans to dry on the vine for next years crop. Also if you let them grow a large bean and then pick 'em you can dry them for what we call shelly beans, I've also heard them called "leather britches beans".

[Matt In Oklahoma]

I planted something different this year it was bush beans from Burpeecalled Ejote Silvestre. They seem to be doing well and we got our first handful today. We planted them in plastic toy bins and buckets on the south side of the house.

[goatlady]

Down here shelly beans are the seed shelled from the dried on the vine bean pods and Leather britches are the whole dried green bean picked off the vine green and then dried.