Planting Snap Beans and Growing Your own Fertility

This week on my to do list was a note to plant snap beans for the fall crop.  One thing I always look forward to for our Thanksgiving feast is fresh green beans wrapped in bacon and cooked in the oven.  It is a tasty side dish.  Of course, anything wrapped in bacon makes  a tasty side dish.  Fresh picked snap beans from the garden are so delicious.  There's no comparison to canned beans.

I planted two varieties for the fall garden this year: Italian Roma II and Contenders.  I pulled back the 3 inch layer of wood chip mulch to expose the soil and worked up a thin line to mark a 25 foot row for each variety.  Then, using a piece of PVC pipe, I drug it across the worked up seedbed to make a 1 inch trench in which to plant the beans.

Both of these varieties are bush beans, meaning they bush out and don't vine up a pole.  I plant them about four inches apart.  I don't measure.  I simply eye-ball it.  

One thing that I forgot to mention is that I had two rows of green beans growing in the same general location for the spring crop.  I moved the row over about 6 inches from where the spring crop rows were for the fall crop.  Generally, I like to plant different crops in different areas in order to rotate the crops since different crops use different minerals.

In this case, I wanted to see if these green beans would benefit from growing near where the spring crop was.  Why is this?  Well, beans are legumes and legumes fix nitrogen in the soil.  How?  Well, I wasn't very good at all at chemistry, but I can repeat what I've learned.  80% of our atmosphere is made up of nitrogen (N2).  Beans have a bacteria called rhizobia that lives on or near the roots of the plant.  The bacteria live in nodules on the roots and convert N2 nitrogen into NH3 (ammonia form of nitrogen) that the plant can use to grow.  What a beneficial partnership!  Most of that is used by the plant but some leaches into the soil and can be used for fertility for other crops as long as the plants and nodules are incorporated into the soil.

As I was preparing the seed bed, I unearthed three good examples of nitrogen fixing nodules from the spring crop I wanted to show you.

Here's one:

And another.  Can you see the little nodules on the roots?:

And here's another with relatively large nodules:

I quickly buried them in the soil and went ahead and covered the two rows of newly planted green beans with homegrown nitrogen.  We'll see how they do.

We got a one inch rain and BOOM!  The beans are popping up out of the ground like popcorn.

Once we get some sunshine, they will grow quickly.  They'll feed us and the nitrogen fixing nodules will feed the plant and next year's crop to boot.