Harvesting Beans

It's bean day! That means I'm ripping out my bean plants to process and freeze all my delicious bean produce. If you don't have room for a huge vegetable garden there are a few things that are really worth doing at home: lettuce, tomatoes and beans.

Beans are incredibly easy, even the least-green of thumbs will have success with beans, and they are just delicious straight out of the garden. To freeze my beans I tip them, wash and blanch for 4 minutes, then put them in ziplock bags to freeze. They store quite well and I should have enough for the whole winter.

The best way to ensure you're not going to get a glut of any one kind of vegetable from the garden is to succession plant. What that means is, you want your harvest to be gradual, over as much of the season as possible. The best way to achieve this is to plant a little every few weeks, starting from the beginning of the season, until you're too close to your frost-date for the plants to mature.

I plant bush-beans, which means that the beans grow into a bush and don't need trellising to support them. There are lots of different varieties of beans (I'm actually not sure what kind mine are any more) the most important factor is to pick a variety that is going to produce a bean you like to eat. You're also going to want to decide if you want green beans or dry beans and whether you have the horizontal space for bush beans or the vertical for runner beans. I also have my Scarlett runner beans, which produce both a slightly starchy green bean and a very nice dry bean; and a few experiment varieties a friend gave me.

I find planting beans seeds 3 weeks apart produces the best bean succession. You want to start harvesting beans about a week or two before the entire plant is ready to be harvested, that way you're going to get the best yield. Once the entire bean plant has grown on all it's flowers, and the youngest beans are just big enough to eat you'll want to rip out your entire plant and put in a new seed. They just aren't prolific once they've produced their fruit. Or you can leave the plant as a green manure for next year if it's late in the season.

Beans are one of the easiest plant to save seed from, you just need to let the bean mature on the plant, leave them until the entire plant dies back and the beans rattle around in the pods. Then store in a cool dry location for planting next year. You're going to need longer then your bean's mature-date for this to happen. I always leave a few beans on the plants from my very first harvest of the season, that way I'm sure to have some mature seed for next year.

When planting remember to count backwards from your frost date. Mine is October 5th, but I want my plants to have a week or two before that to finish growing. Most bush beans take between 50-55 days to mature. So I want to give mine 60-65 days, meaning 2 months. So my last day to plant beans should be August 5th.

Careful planning and a little luck with the weather, meant I was able to get 5 solid blocks of succession planting in this year and that worked very well. My largest, freezer batch worthy, block of beans came in with enough time to put down one more big planting so I can have enough to do another freezer-batch in the early fall.