They’re looking really good. Picked 2.5 lbs in this first picking. No need for the ladder this early in the season. Of the 14 ten-foot poles, I’ll leave the corner pole closest to the corn unpicked for seed.
With no rain for the last 23 days, mostly sunny and warm, watering has been intensive – almost every day with the wand in the bean bed. The beans are equally spaced so tightly throughout the bed that the few hesitations in watering resulted in some yellow leaves at the bottoms of some of the plants.
So far there are no sightings of the new nasty Brown Marmorated Stink Bug from China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_marmorated_stink_bug that showed up at my place last year. They started out looking like long legged ticks then grew bigger to chunky short legged spiders and finally to full sized, shield shaped bugs the size of dimes. They sucked juices out of the growing beans. It looks like wimpipedia has removed all previous references of the bugs coming to the west coast in shipping containers from communist china.
Last year’s crop was badly staggered and extended from poor seed germination. This year’s crop had much better, uniform germination and should be quicker and shorter. Hopefully this might help beat the bugs this time.
Next year, with this good germination I may consider slightly wider spacing – going to 8 inch square centers throughout the bed. If the beans are competing for water so intensively they may be competing for nutrition as well. Closer spacing might give me more beans but wider spacing could give me more nutritious ones. And this really is all about feeding a healthy family.
Happy Gardening.
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