Beans are not only a mainstay of our diet, they are of vital importance in a vegetarian diet. It is easy to find many references to the benefits of eating beans. We plant beans in the early spring and again in mid-summer. For years I planted Blue Lake bush beans which I had found were very productive. As important as production is flavor, and they excel in that, also. I tried novelty beans, such as the bush beans which were purple when picked but turned green when cooked. Since beans are the same color as their leaves they are not always easy to find in a dense planting, so these purple beans solved the problem. However both production and taste were not up to par.
I avoided pole beans because of gophers. If they got one or two bush beans there were plenty more and gave me a chance to trap the gopher. Pole beans are vastly more productive but also if you lose one you lose 10x the number of beans. I line beds with metal hardware cloth but the critters often circumvent all my protective measures. For the last few years I made a teepee of sticks and planted 4 beans per stick. This worked and the beans were much easier to find for picking, plus they were higher so one didn't have to bend so much. Mrs. side pocket does much of the harvesting.
This year I'm getting srs. With my son's help we built a giant framework embedded in a trench; the end posts buried another two feet. There will be 15 vertical 1 x 1 strips for a total of 60 plants. The beans are now growing in flats in the greenhouse.
We assembled the structure in the area between the tomato plants and the vegetable beds. Since my son is a perfectionist contractor everything was perfectly measured and connected with huge nuts and bolts.
Then we realized it wouldn't be so easy to move. This was made of salvaged 2 x 4s but from the days that they were actually 2 inches by 4 inches; very heavy. And it would have to be lifted and carried over my valuable tomato crop.
Be very very careful.
Three of us could barely lift it but it was unwieldy. We called the neighbor across the street who willingly came over and helped us. Thanks to my son's careful measurements it slipped easily into the prepared holes, into which we tamped dirt. The trench will be lined with hardware cloth with a rolled edge which will be
totally impregnable to gophers (crosses fingers). I'll fill it with the best soil I can get, amended with my own compost. My hope is that the production will put Jack's beanstalk to shame.
24 inch deep trench.
Presently we have lettuce, parsley, chives, peas, potatoes, garlic, 3 kinds of onions, arugula, watercress, beets, fava beans, asparagus, and weeds thriving in the garden. The peaches are sizing up. Here's hoping you all have some veggies on your kitchen table soon.
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