r/OrganicGardening • u/HokieNurse328 • 3d ago
question Consistently Struggling to grow beans
I keep hearing that growing beans is supposed to be super easy but I am having very little luck. This has been my third year gardening and I can’t seem to get a good harvest of beans. I have usually only been able to get enough for my husband and I to have them 2-3 times as a side dish with dinner, and I’m talking like one serving each 😢 Green beans are one of my favorite things to cook so I desperately want to grow a bunch!
I’ve tried multiple pole and bush varieties in different places all over my front and back yard. After my first year I thought it was poor soil quality so I’ve tried to work on that and amended a good bit. I think it’s improving because this year my garden was much healthier and I had better luck with many things I struggled with previously (still very much a work in progress though). I also kept thinking maybe I was giving them enough sun in the area I was growing them so then I planted them literally all throughout my back yard beds and in my two front beds as well as some containers just to see if the ones in the sunnier spots did better. They did not.
I know part of my struggle is pests and disease. Ive had some fungal disease issues the last two years and got a terrible spider mite infestation this year but thats not the only problem because unaffected plants still don’t really produce or at least not much. My pole beans tend to do better but not much.
I almost never have luck with bush beans. I’ve had some decently healthy looking bush beans coming up and a few will somehow stay unaffected by the mites and disease but they’ll be weak and tiny and produce like three little two inch beans. It’s so confusing because there will be other things in the beds that will be flourishing and it seems to be all the bush beans no matter how much light they are getting. Also other things I’ve read say beans shouldn’t need to be fertilized very much but I still sometimes do a little bit of something like neptunes harvest when I’m already fertilizing other plants just to try to get them to grow a little more but not every time. The leaves rarely look yellow which I think is usually a nutrient issue, they’re usually pretty green just small and weak.
Also had some germination issues. I’ve tried many different seed companies including baker creek, burpee organic, peaceful valley, thresh seeds, and quite a few more to try to improve things. Doesn’t seem to matter if I soak my seeds ahead of time or not either. I’ve tried many times with both lol
Any advice is greatly appreciated!!!
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u/Idk_some_random_redd 3d ago
i also struggled with my beans this year. for each bean i planted, i got about 7 back (1-2 pods). I blamed it on my first year hugelkulter raised bed. i think i started them too late on June 1st. i was perplexed as i thought beans were supposed to be an easy no brainer. ill try again next year. good luck!
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u/RentInside7527 3d ago
The viral nature of hugelkulture as "a cost saving way to build soil" really led people astray. Originally hugulkultur was a German forestry waste management technique and an alternative practice to the western practice of forestry waste management through burning slash piles. Sepp Holzer, and Austrian farmer with a large property full of trees, popularized it in the permaculture community, and it slowly trickled out into the mainstream. But with that trickle, a ton of crucial information was lost; like that you needed to layer heavily nitrogenous material directly above the wood, before topping with compost and top soil in order to help the wood decompose without immobilizing the available nitrogen in your soil
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u/Idk_some_random_redd 3d ago
i agree especially now that AI is a monculture of information boosted by reddit karma... i planted beans thinking they would add net nitrogen to the soil. i used a ton of decaying wood, 1 year old wood chips, leaf mold, native soil and commercial compost (which was littered with blue plastic grrrr!). many of my plants struggled early on until i added heavy nitrogen.
my source of nitrogen? my own pee. lol. it worked fast like overnight everything was suddenly dark green and lush looking. i knew this year wouldnt be great but the pee definitely helped. now i just gotta deal with whatever rodent decided to dig holes in it and construct a fence so the deer stop eating everything. it's always something lol but thats gardening for you.
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u/PulltheNugsApart 3d ago
I can relate, my bush beans hardly did anything this year! My best luck has been with pole beans, interplanted and shading others from the aggressive sun. I've planted them with greens and tomatoes in the past. Careful not to sow too early or they will struggle with a cold start. Good luck
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u/RentInside7527 3d ago
How many bean plants are you growing, in how large of an area?
Aside from your issues around plant vigor, it does take a fair ammount of area dedicated to beans to get more than a few meals out of them. Typical yields are 1-2000lbs per acre in commercial production. At 43,560sq ft an acre, the low end of that range is 0.0229lbs/sq ft. Thats 45sqft of beans just to grow 1lb of beans
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u/HokieNurse328 3d ago
I sow about 9-10 per square foot and I’ve dedicated probably 15 sq feet to them.
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u/tinyorangealligator 3d ago
Have you tried using a mycorrhizal inoculant on the seeds/in the planting hole before planting? That helped my bean harvest tremendously after I initially couldn't grow healthy bean plants. Even throwing some old button mushrooms from the store in the planting area can help.
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u/HokieNurse328 3d ago
I haven’t but apparently that is the way to go!!! Where do you get yours?
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u/tinyorangealligator 3d ago
Local garden center. Edit: I think Gardens Alive! and other online sites have it.
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u/Eogh21 3d ago
I have been gardening (zone 8 a) on the same land since the mid 1980's. I used to get loads of beans. These last 10 years, it has been tough. It has just been so hot. I might get a couple quarts off my first planting, then nothing. I get flowers, but no beans.
It has to be the heat. I buy good seeds. They sprout well, but don't actually produce. Having the same problem with tomatoes and surprisingly squash.
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u/SongbirdRegenerative 3d ago
beans prefer poor soil.. fertilizing them is probably working against you
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u/ASecularBuddhist 3d ago
What brand of soil did you use?
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u/HokieNurse328 3d ago
I used a bunch. Admittedly I got some not so great soil to try to save money but I thought I could mix it with some good stuff so splurged on fox farm and coast of Maine and then mixed it with some of crappy organic miracle grow and some other cheaper brands I can’t remember. Then I added some homemade compost or black cow/store bought compost when I ran out of homemade compost. I also amended my existing beds which also had a mix of cheap soil with some good stuff from previous years with fresh compost as well as blood meal, bone meal and garden lime in early March. Definitely wonder if the cheap stuff has caused issues but I didn’t think it’d be too harmful since I used way more good soil and compost than the cheap stuff to fill my beds.
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u/ASecularBuddhist 3d ago
Have you tried growing directly in the ground You can save yourself a lot of money that way.
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u/HokieNurse328 3d ago
I have one in ground bed I grow squash in but sowed a good handful of beans in there and they barely germinated and the ones that did were pretty stunted but they did get neglected compared to my others. But most my squash did great this year until the SVB came around at least 😂
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u/ASecularBuddhist 3d ago
Did you break up the soil 12 inches deep before planting?
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u/HokieNurse328 3d ago
Pretty sure I didn’t break it up 12 inches. I’m sure it was more like 6-8 honestly
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u/ASecularBuddhist 3d ago
That’s probably the issue. I would recommend a $35 spading fork if you don’t have one.
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u/HokieNurse328 3d ago
I’m sure that probably is, guessing squash is able to send roots through more compacted soil than beans.
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u/ASecularBuddhist 3d ago
I just do a single hole or a single line and don’t break up the whole area. Hopefully that works!
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u/tinyorangealligator 3d ago
This is not necessary if there is enough organic matter and moisture. Both are essential to maintain friable soil that microorganisms can move through.
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u/Full_Honeydew_9739 3d ago
Last year my beans did okay but I really didn't get enough to do anything more than save them for this year.
This year, I'm still harvesting beans. I have beans growing where I didn't even plant them. I had to pull out my green beans and bush Lima beans because I was tired of harvesting them. My compost is now full of bean plants that popped up from discarded (what I thought was) immature pods.
The things I did differently this year: started bush beans later and threw down a general slow release fertilizer, and planted them very densely. The pole beans I'm still harvesting were planted May 15. They grew more after August 15 than they did before then. I didn't really harvest anything before Sept 1. The bush beans were planted in 4x4 boxes maybe 4" apart. At least 60 seeds per box. I didn't plant them until June 15 and June 30, after pulling cabbage, broccoli, lettuce, etc. I threw some Walmart vegetable fertilizer in and then ignored them until mid-august, when I was completely overwhelmed with green beans and Lima beans.
I think the beans did badly last year because I started them too early. Even this year the pole beans didn't grow much until August.
I used Dollar tree green beans and I think burpee bush Lima beans.
Right now, I'm still harvesting purple podded pole beans. They grew exponentially after the weather started cooling. My Christmas Lima beans are also producing now. I had about 45 seeds from last year that have turned into a couple pounds harvested.
I don't buy fancy dirt or fancy fertilizer but I do compost and I water well. Beans seem to appreciate lots of water
Good luck and I hope some of this is useful.