When you grow a crop of dwarf beans they do not produce over a long period. You tend to get a major first flush of beans and then a few weeks after that is exhausted you get a secondary flush where the beans are not as numerous as the initial flush, but enough for a few meals. Between the two flushes and after the secondary one you get a few beans here and there. The trick is to set things up so that you get a more-or-less continuous crop rather than the natural tendency for the beans to provide a “feast or famine”. After some trial and error, I seem to have finally got it right!
Sowing
It is a truism that you sow the larger seeds (peas, beans, pumpkin, zucchini, corn etc.) directly into the ground while the smaller seeds are planted into punnets, but what I have found is that it makes sense to plant bean seeds into punnets as well. I do this for a number of reasons –
- I know exactly how many bean plants I have to work with,
- I can plant them out so that they are evenly spaced, no ‘holes’ or congested areas due to uneven germination,
- I have better control over germination conditions so I can ensure maximum produce from my seed,
- Planting out seedlings rather than seeds gives the plant a jumpstart over pests.
Our usual process is to use 8 cell seedling punnets and sow a different type of seed in each cell so that we get all the seedlings we need for each fortnightly planting from one or two punnets. However due to the size of the bean seeds I only sow one seed per cell. I sow 8 punnets with 8 seeds per punnet (i.e. 64 seeds total) every two weeks from August through to the end of March, although sometimes the March sowings don’t make it if winter sets in early.
Planting Out
Once sown the punnets all go onto a coarse sand capillary bed to keep them moist as per the usual process. They only take a week or two to come up and get big enough to plant out. Sixty four bean seeds gives me plenty to plant three or four rows at the end of the bed and still leave enough extra to cover seeds which don’t germinate.
I plant into a bed which has been mulched but use a dibber to open a small hole in the mulch and then down into the soil. I remove the bean seedling form its cell, retaining as much of the potting soil as possible which is quite easy because the cells have sloped sides. I then slip the seedling into the hole and firm the soil and mulch around the roots. Each bean plant is about 50mm from the next one with 50mm – 75mm between the rows. The very fertile organic soil allows such close plantings.
Harvesting
You can usually start harvesting beans from the plants within a month and a half once they start to produce. If you follow the sowing plan you will be eating beans regularly all the way through to April at least. We get plenty for the two of us, but if you are needing more you may wish to scale up your operation a bit.
