Planting Beans, Growing Beans, How to Grow Beans

East tips for planting beans when backyard vegetable gardening. Learn how to plant, care for, and extend the harvest of beans such as lima and green beans in your vegetable garden.Companion planting beans is a form of inter-planting in which the space-sharing plants are selected on the basis of their ability to enhance one another's growth.

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Vegetable gardening methods using bed companions is an age-old practice that is thought to bring together a number of benefits for the paired plants. These advantages include: weed, pest, and disease control and growth and flavor enhancement.

Classic or Traditional Companion Planting for Bean Plants

Marigolds and potatoes reduce Mexican bean beetles; corn improves growth; rosemary repels insects; catnip repels flea beetles; celery helps growth.

Plants that hinder bean plant growth:

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Fennel, onion family

Planting Beans

Critical Times for Watering Growing Beans

In general, over-watering is as hard on plants as watering too little. When planting, excessive watering washes away nutrients from soil, displaces needed soil air, and may cause leafy growth at the expense of flowers and fruit.

Beans: Dried, Lima, Green Snap or Pole Beans

Essential Time Period:

Pollination and pod development; pod enlargement; delay may cause pod drop

Amount of Water

Dried Beans: ¾ gal. per foot of row a week

Lima Beans: 1 gal. per foot of row a week

Green or Snap Beans: 1 gal. per foot of row a week

Early Maturing Bean Varieties

No matter where you live and vegetable garden, if total productivity is one of your top priorities, always give preference to compact or vertically grown varieties that are early bearing. When planting beans, the more crops you can fit into a growing season, the better! For fast moving successions:

How to Grow Bush Beans:

Bountiful is ready for harvest in 46 days. Top Crop can be harvested in 49 days. Provider is ripe for the picking in 50 days.

High yielding varieties

Vertical growing is the ultimate in space saving. Long-vined indeterminate crops are much more productive than the short-viners. When harvested regularly, these lanky types flower and fruit as long as the weather allows. The heavier, more prolonged yield coming from vining plants often produces from early summer all the way to frost.

Planting Green Beans

Dade is rust resistant and bred for fall planting in hot, humid climates.

Kentucky Wonder is a climbing heavy producer of very tasty 7 to 9 inch pods.

Romano is tender, stringless, Italian bean yielding up to 20 pounds per plant.

Stringless Blue Lake is a fiberless high quality bean that bears early in 60 days.

Growing Lima Beans

Burpee's Best has the quality of a Fordhook bush but higher yields on vines of 10-12 feet.

Carolina is early bearing in 78 days.

King of the Garden grows enormous crops of giant beans on 8 foot vines.

Prizetaker produces giant beans of top quality and flavor.

Planting beans provides super nutritious crops for a high nutrient yield. Lima bean varieties such as Burpee's Best or Cangreen Bush are in the top ten for vitamin C.

Extending Bean Harvest

To extend the normal bean growing season try planting beans like the cool loving favas for an early start.

Although, these shelled beans take three months to mature, they can be planted as early as peas, or seven weeks before the last spring frost.

Their harvest will be underway about the time limas, which they resemble in taste, are being planted.

Two favorable favas are Windsor and Ipro.

A continuous bean harvest starts with planting beans like favas first, then snap beans, followed by limas. Next comes traditional bush limas, shell beans, green soybeans, pole snap beans, pole limas, and finally dried beans for winter use.

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Planting Beans to Vegetable Gardening

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