Pickin’ a Mess of Green Beans – April 2016

The month of April was as perfect as perfect can be for growing green beans.  Perfect temperatures.  Perfect rainfall.  Just perfect.  The first variety I planted was our old standby – Contender Green Beans.  We’ve found these to be solid producers, consistent, tender, and best of all – good eatin’!  I planted them (two seeds wide – 6 inches apart) back on February 20^th on a row 18” wide and 24’ long.  The young leaves are Kelly green, while the older leaves are almost blue, letting you know that they are enjoying the composted chicken manure that was amended into the garden soil prior to planting.  At the flowering stage, I top-dressed with a sprinkling of the same.

Healthy Contender Green Beans

To crowd out weeds, I mulched the young plants with a thick layer of chopped up live oak leaves and grass from the first mowing of the year.  This will rot over the course of the growing season and become organic matter.  It is also what I call my “earthworm magnet,” as the decomposing leaves attracts earthworms almost faster than a plate of rice & gravy does to Cajuns.   I grabbed a colander and bent over at the beginning of the row at the first plant.  There are green beans of all different stages on the plant.  That’s good news.  I use two hands to pull each bean so as to not damage the plant.  If you are in a rush and use only one hand, you run the risk of breaking off more than just the bean, but the entire fruiting stalk of the plant that contains other (unripe) beans.

Different Stages of Development

To show the full cycle, the picture below shows that while we are picking mature beans, there are plenty of immature beans as well as blooms.  This lets you know that there is a nice, steady stream of green bean inventory that will need to be checked and harvested every 2-3 days or so.  I like them to be young and tender, before the beans inside the pod have swollen.  Actually the one in the picture above was a little too big for my liking, but sometimes they are hiding in the foliage and you miss them the first time you pick.  No worries – they’re still good.

Blooms and pods

I filled up a nice bucket of beans on this day.  They were clean and bug free with little to no damage.  Sometimes the beans will be discolored or diseased from touching the ground, but these were all perfect.  The chickens clucking just across the fence are generally the recipients of any damaged beans.  They’ll eat anything that we won’t.

Bucket 'o Beans

I took the bucket of beans into the kitchen, washed them up and snapped off the ends of the beans.  People called these beans “string beans” because in the past, you’d snap off the ends and remove a long string from the pod.  The string was inedible.  Contender green beans don’t have this string, so you don’t have to worry about the step of ‘stringing’ them.  They are ready to eat.

Mountain 'o Beans

Speaking of ready to eat.  I’m ready to eat a nice ‘mess’ of beans – the first beans of the season.  I dug a few potatoes from the garden and we cooked the baby potatoes along with the green beans with a generous amount of butter.

A nice Mess of Beans (and baby potatoes)!

A mess of fresh picked green beans.  It don’t get much better than this!  Tomorrow we’ll show you another thing we do with them.