Clever Green Gardening Tips For Growing Beans Intensively
Heres a brilliantly quick and easy idea for growing beans in volume from a man who is a highly serious collector of rare heirloom vegetables
. You won't find him building cute bean wigwams, though. Beans will grow in a very small root space, he reasons, so why not exploit that?
Here is his Ultra-Intensive Trellis. I first build a frame from PVC pipe, he told me. It comes in 10ft lengths, which is ideal. I use three uprights (to prevent sagging in the middle) and I bury them 18in deep, with a crosspiece at the top. Along the top rail I tie degradable string every six inches. So at season's end, the whole thing can be cut down for the compost bin. Another string is tied at ground level, from one upright to the next, and the hanging strings tied off to it.
I suggested an alternative, common in European allotments: You could put another crosspiece along the bottom - and double-loop the strings around it. Might be less work than tying each off? Being deep in leguminous ponderings, he ignored me.
Three - yes, three - rows of beans are planted along the bottom string, he triumphed. One seed goes on each side of each vertical string, 4in from the string. Then another seed goes right underneath the bottom string, centred between each vertical string. More seeds go to the front and back of the upright pipes. And, would you believe it? I sow those seeds at just one-inch intervals. I wind up with 30 foot of row in only a ten foot length. As the vines grow, I get a solid wall of beans.
Growing beans intensively in temperate climes
True, he lives in the southern US where the light is strong and growing days are long, bright and warm. Indeed, in the tropics, climbing beans can be successfully planted one inch apart in the row. Provided they get enough light on the leaf canopy, and ample feeding and watering, beans will grow together as tightly as radishes. But if you live in more temperate climes, he recommended that you space your seed a cautious three inches apart and align the rows in a North/South direction to give them the maximum sunlight.
In my experience, an intensive - three row - trellis works well even in a cool climate given ample watering, say, from a leaky hose. So thickly do the plants grow, weeds are minimal.
I don't bother weeding between the walls, except at the start, because they act as a mulch for each other, he said. Weeds don't harm mature bean plants.
No weeding? Lazy gardening? He and I are twin souls. He builds his trellises three foot apart. That's far enough so that his climbing French beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), the common bean, will not easily cross-pollinate. So the resulting seed from each rare heirloom bean variety stays pure.
Don't grow more than one variety of runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus) in your garden, however, if you want to save the seed and preserve its integrity. Or especially, if your neighbour is growing a different variety. Runners need an isolation distance of at least one mile!
How to keep your bean varieties pure
Idea: if your neighbour insists on growing mundane Painted Lady runners while you are trying to raise, and save true for seed, some rare heirloom bean... give that good person some of your seed! If you both grow the same variety, cross-pollination is not an issue. Moreover, when the slugs get your seedlings, you can borrow back some of your neighbours seed.
Using this simple but intensive trellis, my friend raised 120 row-feet of beans in a space just 10ft x 9ft. If he was growing merely one variety, he said, he'd space the trellises only two foot apart - and let the vines tangle. In that case, he said 180 row-feet could be planted in a space only 10ft x 10ft.
Thats what I call intensive heirloom bean growing!
I wish he had told me that before I set out some 400 bamboo canes one year, crafted into ingenious tents, minarets and wigwams. I'd forgotten the maxim: 'what goes in, must come out.' Oh, but did I remember it - that autumn!
by: John Yeoman
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