I want to share our first {successful} round of green bean gardening with you all. It was our first large crop that we found success in. Which is always exciting in a new garden. We made enough to even cook for dinner!
Started by seed
We chose pole beans mostly because they looked easy to grow and I liked the idea that we could save space by having a more vertical garden. We used easy to find seeds at our local Home Depot and used a seed starting kit with a humidity dome to get them started. We did lose a couple of them during the process but ended up with 24 strong plants ready to be planted.
Going Vertical
Pole beans grow UP! Fantastic space savers. I watched several different videos of gardeners who have used poles for them to climb or different type trellis.. and of course those ambitious folks who turn their plants into pieces of art with this tee-pee design. One requirement I have had with our garden is to use as what we have in our yard, and only buy gardening supplies if we need it. In my mind if we are spending hundreds of dollars on sticks and fancy gardening tools – are we really saving any money buy growing food? So I took a quick trip around our property. I was surprised (but shouldn’t have been) to find at the back of our property, the previous owners had used fencing to create what looked like huge tomato cages. These were PERFECT! We stuck as many of them as we could in our garden bed and staged the 24 green bean plants around them evenly.
Growin’ Crazy
One of my favorite things about growing green beans is how fast they climb. You get an immediate sense of accomplishment with a wall of green leaves. Ours went from the above pictures to the below pictures in about 4 weeks time.
Harvesting
It was about 6 weeks before we were collecting a large bundle of green beans. We used most of them in our homemade dog food, but I did get the opportunity to use some for dinner. They are super easy to pick, you just snap them right at the stem. After washing, you simply cook them just as you would fresh green beans bought at your local grocery store {but these are FREE}
