Beans are a great garden crop for home gardeners here in NE Oklahoma and there are a variety of beans available that should fit most anyone’s growing style. I say growing style, because whether we acknowledge it or not, each of our personal gardens has a particular style and by style, I mean our approach to growing vegetables.

Some of us have nice, neat rows of vegetables where weeds that want to crowd our vegetables are quickly dispatched to the trash. While others may be equally weed free (or not) with plants growing everywhere in what would seem to be a very random fashion. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, I just tend to lean into the more linear, organized row type gardener. Because of this, our Master Gardener Seed to Supper Farm takes a more linear approach to vegetable gardening with multiple rows of vegetables in both 100- and 200-foot lengths. But we are also trying to generate thousands of pounds of produce during the season, so there’s that. Either way works.

Beans are pretty easy to grow unless you decided to plant them in the midst of our local monsoon season. We planted a few hundred feet of bean seeds at our Seed to Supper Farm a little bit before we got almost 10 inches of rain recently. Well, our beans flooded out so we are going to be re-planting this week some time. This will delay our initial crop of beans, but one of the good things about growing beans is that you can succession plant for multiple harvests.

For those unfamiliar with the term “succession planting” it means that, rather than planting all of our bean seeds for one large harvest, we plant them in stages so that we have multiple harvests throughout the season. For example, we’ll plant two, 200-foot double rows of beans this week. Then in about 3 weeks, we’ll plant another couple of rows, and then about 3 weeks after that we’ll plant another couple of rows. This succession planting can repeat for as much garden space as you have.

Then, once we harvest green beans, we’ll replant in the spot where we harvested to give us another crop later on. This process will repeat, providing us with green beans all season long.

When deciding to grow beans, you’ll need to decide which type of bean you want to grow, and beans typically fall into two categories: bush beans and pole beans. Bush beans are exactly what they sound like, bean plants that grow in a bush type plant. Pole beans on the other hand are a plant that grows on vines. Pole beans are a good type of bean to grow when space is limited since they grow vertically up a trellis giving you more beans per square foot of your garden.

In the bush bean variety, we’ve had really good luck with a variety called Jade, but OSU also recommends Bush Blue Lake, Contender, Derby, among others. In the pole bean variety, OSU suggests Kentucky Blue, Kentucky Wonder, Meralda, and Pinto.

When planting bush beans, OSU recommends planting bush bean seeds at a rate of about 7 to 9 seeds per/foot row. When planting pole beans, oftentimes, a 4- to 5-foot-tall tripod is used as a trellis with about 2-3 bean seeds around each support leg of the trellis.

Beans will do best when they are well fertilized. For example, let’s assume you have a 10’ by 10 plot of beans. For this amount of space, you should sprinkle about 2-3 pounds of 10-20-10 in that area. Then after the plants begin to flower, you can add about 1/2 cup of that fertilizer for every 10 feet of plant/rows.

Beans don’t like to get dry, so keep an eye on soil moisture levels. Right now, we have an abundance of water available, but we all know that this trend likely won’t continue. If beans are too dry when flowering, the flower will just drop and you won’t get any beans, so be especially careful to keep them hydrated during this critical time.

With any luck, you should be able to harvest your bush beans in about 50 to 60 days after planting, depending on the variety. Pole beans take a little longer. You’ll know it’s time to harvest your beans when they are about the size of a small pencil. When trying to decide if it’s time, check for this size, and then see if your beans snap when you bend them. If they bend and don’t snap, you likely waited too long, and your beans will tend to be tough and stringy.

We’ve had very little issue with insects going after the beans at our Seed to Supper farm, but they can fall victim to cabbage loopers, aphids, and thrips. Bacillus thuringiensis is a good organic pesticide to treat for cabbage loopers. Insecticidal soap will work on aphids and thrips.

When it’s time to harvest, be careful not to damage your plants since you can probably get multiple harvests before the bean plant is done. And that’s about it. See you in the garden!

You can get answers to all your gardening questions by calling the Tulsa Master Gardeners Help Line at 918-746-3701, dropping by our Diagnostic Center at 4116 E. 15th Street, or by emailing us at mg@tulsamastergardeners.org. Photo: OSU Ag. Comm.