Posted on 03/03/2012 4:20:37 AM PST by orsonwb
Complete planting guide for Green Beans including state specific varieties, harvest dates, nutrition facts, planting, watering, fertilizing, insect and disease information...
(Excerpt) Read more at howdogardener.com ...
“Give them another try with onion, bacon, red pepper and a little vinegar for seasoning - mmm, mmm, go-o-od!”
If you have to put all of that in to make beans palatable, why not skip all the work of growing them and just eat the onion, bacon, red pepper and a little vinegar for seasoning?
Anyone here save seeds? Just finished reading a book on seed saving and cannot believe how complicated it sounds!
A restaurant in my town serves them fried in a seasoned batter as an appetizer. They are absolutely delicious...
I’m starting to learn about saving seeds and having some luck. Hopefully seed saving will be covered on one of the weekly gardening threads.
We have eight 6 x 40 foot raised garden beds with pergolas above each for hanging crops, grapes, general gardening etc .... This past winter we have been looking at how to “expand” on the space we have and considered the use of hydroponics indoors year round. Flat space at a minimum I saw this “window farming concept” of hanging hydroponics.
Any one here do such and what is best food crop to grow in em ?
http://www.wimp.com/windowfarmsproject/
Stay safe !
Here’s a fun idea I thought I’d share. We have a gazebo on our second story deck and I was inspired to grow some ‘vines’ on the vertical supports. I got some large deep pots and planted pole beans in them and set the pots at the base of the supports. Those beans just took over the gazebo and everyone loved being able to pick the ‘beans in space’ as we sat at the outdoor table. Here in Minnesota, it will be a couple of months until I can try it again. Cant wait!
I saved seeds from my green beans last year. It didn’t seem too complicated, not like carrots or beets. When the plants were reaching their peak production, I chose a few to stop picking from, letting the pods ripen until they turned tan. We had such a wet fall that they weren’t going to dry on the vine, so I picked the tan ones as they changed color and spread them out on newspaper to finish drying. When they were dry and brittle, I cracked the pods open and spread the seeds out for another week to make sure they were very dry, then packed in an old pill bottle with a dessicant pack.
(Actually, several pill bottles. After the plants died down there were a ton more that had ripened under the leaves out of sight, so I dried those for seed as well. I ended up with a nice pile of them!)
If you end up with too many green bean seeds, you can use them as dry shelling beans.
This is wonderful! Green beans are a staple in our family.
Interesting. I’m thinking of just starting small and saving some tomato seeds and maybe green beans.
Did you worry about cross-pollination? Not only do you have to be concerned about plants from the same species crossing but also neighbors’ plants and sometimes up to 3 miles away! That is so extreme. I don’t know how anyone could do it.
That would be great. I hope so too.
Thanks JaDB, seems like a good day to plant some seeds. Indoors of course...
I always grow “Contender” green beans every year, and your saving technique sounds similar to mine. Has always worked well.
I’m ready to put in the entire garden after the 15th of March. Given the mild winter this year, that’s the safe planting date.
That’s just to bring the weak-kneed into the fold. Once you get em there, you can work toward butter, salt and pepper and, finally, right off the vine/bush.
Beans are pretty easy and will stay true to their genetics without much bother, Other stuff, like corn, runs out pretty quickly and needs special precautions. Some books are pretty simple (and sometimes inaccurate) but others do a good job of guiding people through difficult methods to preserve genetic purity of the seed. The best treatment of seed saving I know of is this book:
Seed To Seed - Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners
Susanne Ashworth
Seed Savers Exchange, 2002
Most good OP seed catalogs now carry this title. If not, I’m sure Amazon does.
A link to some pretty good info on seed saving can be found in our 1/13/2012 thread: Weekly Gardening Thread (Seeds) Vol. 2, January 13, 2012, and the thread itself may contain info from other members.
I'd be happy to do a thread devoted to the subject in the future. Don't ever hesitate to make requests on anything that would be of interest ... your feedback is very much appreciated!
Technically, tomatoes and green beans can cross-pollinate. Realistically, due to the way the flower is structured, it’s unlikely to happen naturally. So, as long as you started with non-hybrids, you can get pretty pure seeds without worrying about it.
Those are the exceptions, though. With most vegetables the chances of crossing are a lot higher. The plants with nice big flowers like squash, you can tape a few blossoms closed when they’re just getting ready to open, then pollinate manually. I’m afraid I don’t have much experience with saving other types of seed from smaller-blossomed plants, I’m still getting started on seed saving myself. Still hoping the watermelon seeds I saved last year are fairly pure, they were Golden Midgets, which can get hard to find sometimes because they sell out so fast.
I should rephrase that, I didn’t mean to make it sound like beans and tomatoes could cross with each other, just that their unlikely to cross with members of the same species growing nearby.
For Bush Beans I plant ‘Derby’ or ‘Jade’ (green) and I LOVE ‘Goldito’ for a skinny yellow filet bush bean.
For Pole Beans I like ‘Fortex’ and I usually plant ‘Hilda Romano’ for my pole Romano (flat) bean for fresh eating or drying.
Last year was terrible for beans, as our soil would NOT warm up. I had to re-seed 4x! But, I still had a huge crop and was picking beans well into October!
Shameless plug for my company:
Anybody gonna try Bush beans this year - for a little nostalgia?
Hopefully they won’t sprout a$$paper like the last batch did.
{badumpump}
Heh. Last year we planted pole beans with the sweat-corn and both did well. Gonna do it again this year.
It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement where the pole beans get something to climb on, and the nitrogen-hungry Corn benefits from the nitrate fixing legumes they’re hosting.
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