Beans are easy-to-grow vegetables that will bring you, as food-loving-humans, and the pollen-seeking bees SO much joy! Beans come in many different shapes and colours, and there are over 40,000 different varieties that are being preserved and stored in genebanks. Isn’t that mindblowingly, friggin’ AMAZING?
Beans can be sowed in cooler regions starting from mid May after the last frosty nights. The seeds germinate quite quickly (between 6-16 days depending on weather conditions) and grow into strong bean plants that produce an abundance of beautiful small butterfly-like flowers. The colour of the bean flowers depend on its variety: they can be white, white with black spots, red, purple, blue, pink or yellow.
Bean flowers are being sought out especially by bees because of their pollen.
In this article we will focus on runner beans which are easy to grow and keep flowering all throughout spring and summer and will produce plenty of legumes during the growing season. If you wanna give it a try and start to grow them, you won’t be disappointed.
Runner beans like to climb upwards and therefore need a climbing support such as a garden fence or sticks. Bush bean varieties, on the other hand, do not need any climbing support and grow between 30-50 cm high. Runner beans can be planted in you garden but can also grow on your balcony in pots - all they need is a sunny plot and plenty of water. Beans are very undemanding and usually do not need fertiliser or compost to grow.
For one square metre of runner beans in your garden plot or in a big container on your balcony, we recommend to put up 5 or 6 bamboo sticks (or normal thin tree branches of approx. 1,5 - 2m length) in the shape of a tipi as climbing support. The upper parts of the sticks can be fixated with strong cotton string. Here is a chart to illustrate how your plot with the tipi climbing support sticks could look like:
If you have prepared your runner bean plot with a climbing support you are ready for the next step: you can sow the beans, hooray!
There are different possibilities to sow the seeds: You can either sow the seeds directly into the soil of your garden plot in circles around the ends of the tipi sticks, approx. 3 - 5cm deep, starting from mid May, if you live in a cooler climate zone. To get the runner beans going a little sooner, you can also sow the seeds into plant pots or module trays on your window sill at the end of April, and plant the bean plants out in mid May when there are no more frosty nights to come. You need to make sure to keep the sprouting seeds and growing plants moist and to water them plenty when the soil is dry, especially during hot summers.
The colorful flowers will be visited by bees and bumble bees in the following months. Harvest your runner beans when they are around 15cm long and do not eat them raw, but boil them in water. The more beans you harvest, the more flowers your plants will produce.
If you would like to keep some seeds for sowing them again in the following year, simply let a few beans stay on the mother plant and wait until the pods turn yellow and dry.
Keep the harvested dry pods in a warm and dark place and peel out the bean seeds when they are dry and hard. Store the seeds in a plastic-free container, for example a paper bag, a coffee filter or a wooden box until you can sow them out into your plot again in the next season.
If you wanna make an impact and preserve and grow runner bean varieties that are not commonly or commercially grown, we recommend you to grow these organic heirloom varieties that are perfect for hobby gardeners:
Runner bean `Vigneronne’ also called `Weinländerin’ (Heirloom runner bean, regarded as an almost forgotten variety. Produces long pale green vegetables with purple coloured speckles.)
Runner bean `Czar’ (Pale green heirloom variety from around 1888.)
Runner bean `Scarlet Emperor’ (A tall climbing heirloom variety that flowers in bright scarlet red and produces long green pods. It was fist cultivated around 1633.)
For more reading about heirloom vegetables we recommend:
Thomas Etty and Lorriane Harrison (2016): Heirloom Plants: A complete Compendium of Heritage Vegetables, Fruits, Herbs and Flowers. Ivy Press.
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