I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension; today we're going
to plant beans. Part of your preparation for planting beans will be to get
some fertilizer down, and to put down two or three inches of compost, and
work that into the soil. Now the recommendation is about one pound of 16-
16-8 all-purpose fertilizer for a hundred square feet of garden space, so
I've got about a hundred square foot area here and I've weighed out a a pound
of fertilizer. Now if you don't have a scale to weigh out a pound a general
rule of thumb - depending on how this fertilizer is prepared - but a good rule
of thumb is one pint equals one pound. My dad had a saying: "A pints a pound the
world round," so if you...two cups will give you about a pound of fertilizer.
So you want to work your fertilizer and your compost down into the soil a little
bit if you can. I'm just going to rake mine in because I've already got my compost
and everything tilled in; I'm just raking in a little bit of fertilizer here. Now
the size of the seed will help you determine how deep to plant it. So when
the seed's laying like that, the bean seeds about a quarter of an inch thick,
and so if you make your furrow about four times the thickness of the seed
that will give you how deep to go. And so a quarter of an inch - four times - be about
an inch so you want to plant your beans about an inch, probably no deeper than
inch and a half. But it's kind of a rule of thumb: an inch of soil on your trench
and basically covering it with three times the soil depth of the seed, so
that's how you determine how deep to plant your seed. Now it's important to
make sure that you have enough moisture for the seeds to germinate, and so after
I've made my furrows I like to run a little bit of water in there. If you've
had a lot of rain you may not need to do this, but here in dry country Utah I
don't count on the rain very often. And so I want to make sure that I get enough
moisture in my furrows so that after I plant my seeds, they've got enough
moisture to germinate and grow. And so if that's - if there's enough moisture there
I probably won't have to water again until after the seeds pop up. There's
another reason for not watering after you've planted the beans until they've
actually emerged. Beans are very tender and a lot of times if you've got a heavy
soil this...this portion - either the cotyledons or even the plumule
and the epicotyl will break off, and you'll get the bean plant will slow
down. This one here has broken off; the soil kind of held on to it and it broke
off. Now there are buds here it will it will grow and produce beans but it's
been slowed way down as opposed to these that have emerged properly. So the
cotyledons - which are the seed leaves on beans - will come out of the ground,
if the ground is holding it the - you get the crust forming and it's...
on the soil it will sometimes just rip those cotyledons off. But in this case
even it ripped off here at the epicotyl - this portion from the cotyledons to the...
to the leaves, to the true leaves, is called the epicotyl - and that's been
broken off because the ground is was was hanging on to that as it was trying to
open up and broke those off. So it's good to water; put some water in the furrow
when you're planting and then cover it with dry soil, and hopefully you get your
germination and a bean emergence before you have to water. After they've
emerged you should be fine - there's no problem - it's just that emergence that
very tender tissue breaks off sometimes. Now these are bush beans and bush beans
can be fairly tightly planted; they're going to get up about 18 maybe 24 inches
tall, and and then they produce quite heavily, and then they stop producing it
quite so heavily. The nice thing about beans is that you can succession plant
them; you can plant them every two to three weeks and get a good heavy crop
out of your beans about every 2 or 3 weeks. You can do that up until about the
middle of July. For seed placement and spacing beans don't...they do well fairly
well with crowding, but generally if you're going to do one row type system -
if I were going down my bed here instead of across - I would go a row or maybe a
double row and then 18 to 20 inches between the rows. 18 to 24, and then...
between these rows, because I'm going across here on my my wide bed I don't
need to have the pathway-type system. And so I'm going to plant them about twelve
inches apart - the rows about twelve inches apart - and then the spacing of the
seeds within the rows two to four inches. So that's how I'm going to be planting
these; these're a little bit older so I'm going to go to the
inch spacing on these seeds. All right now you've got the seeds planted you
want to cover them over about three quarters to an inch of soil on top of
the seed. And then tamp it down so that you got good seed to soil contact. In
about seven to ten days you should have seeds popping up
out of the ground. Now beans are a tender plant they do not tolerate frost at all,
and so you want to make sure that you plant them when when there's very little
if any chance of frost. You may have to replant if if they get frozen; a little
bit of frost and it'll damage or kill your beans very easily. So generally
speaking you can plant maybe a week before your average last frost date. If
you're a little bit nervous about that, you know, you plant a little bit later
but the soil temperature needs to be up around 70 degrees in order for it to do...
in order for the seeds to germinate well. There are two different types of growth
habits with beans: there's the bush bean which gets 18 to
24 inches tall which you can pack in pretty tight, then there's the pole bean
you can plant them the same spacing but they want to grow up and they'll have a
longer production season. They won't give you that big flush of production at one
point, they'll give you a good production over the entire season so succession
planting is not as critical with pole beans as it is with bush beans. But you
want some sort of a structure to support these; they'll grow up this twine just
fine. So here on my trellis I've got about every six inches or so -
I've got twine across there for those pole beans to go and trellis up and have
a good production through the summer.
Fresh beans from the garden are delicious, much better than anything you
can buy at the store. So there you have it: just one more way to have fun in your
garden.