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 20th 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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