Complete Guide to Planting Beans [article from Articleranks]

Complete Guide to Planting Beans

Hint: Crop rotation is the best organic, natural way to deal with pests and diseases in your garden.

How to Harvest and Save Your Seed
You can start picking and harvesting your beans when they are about 8 to 15 cm long and have a nice green color. The easiest way to determine whether they are ready to be picked is to eat one. There is no one size fit all solution for harvesting beans. They vary from season to season and zone. The harvesting time would be different when the temperature varies when the flowers and pods are developing. The same can be said when you are growing any kind of berries be it growing gooseberries, blackberries or red berries. They are easily affected by any change of the weather.

If you want to save and store your own seeds, the fastest way is to keep some in the pods. The pods would start to turn brown and start splitting. This means they are ready to harvest. The easiest way is to take the seeds out of the pods and keep them in a glass jar or brown paper bag. Make sure you label accordingly. Place them in a dark, dry and cool place. Don't store any that are soft or have mildew on them. This applies when you are growing melons too. Get rid of those melons that are too soft with mildew too.

Some Pointers on Sowing Broad Beans
Although I personally dislike the taste of broad beans I do enjoy eating them when they are still small and in their pods. I usually just pick them from the bush. They taste great. Broad beans are a winter crop and do well in temperate and tropical areas over the colder months. They grow best in soil that has a temperature of 6C and 24C. The flowers will form but they won't set pods if there are frosts. You should plant the beans deep into the ground at around 10cm depth and 15cm apart. Rows need to be about 70cm apart. This spacing allows the air to circulate freely and helps keep them free from fungal disease. The harvesting time for broad beans would be 12 weeks or so. All the different varieties of eggplants that you plant are also susceptible to weather changes.

Hint: To help increase the flowering of broad beans, you can try pinching the apical meristem.

Growing Runner/Scarlet Beans
Runner beans are perennial plants. I highly recommend that you grow them in a place with enough support like stakes so they can have something to hold on to and climb. As soon as you start to see beans germinating you can add in some blood and bones, compost and animal manure to increase the fertility of the soil.

tags:gardening,growing plants,how to grow beans,beans,garden,vegetables