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Beans grow with little care, produce an abundance of pods, and can add nitrogen to the soil, making them ideal plants for organic vegetable gardens. Here's how to grow a beautiful bean crop in your garden.
Choice Varieties When choosing varieties for your garden, read seed-catalog or packet descriptions carefully to be sure that you get those that will mature within your growing season and thrive in your region's conditions. Some varieties prefer hot weather, some favor cooler temperatures, and some can withstand wet weather around harvest time. Here at our Fetzer Vineyards' gardens in Hopland, California (USDA Zones 8-9, with hot, dry summers), we have a few favorite beans that grow well in our climate and please our palates. 'French Horticultural,' a dependable, easy-to-shell, half-inch-long, brown-red bean with deep purple speckles, was ranked best for flavor in our taste tests. It performs well in a wide range of climates. 'Jacob's Cattle' (a.k.a. 'Trout'), a kidney-shaped, white-with-maroon bean, is our choice for baked beans. 'Cannellini' is a large, white bean that adds a nutty flavor to Italian vegetable soups and has a creamy texture. 'Chevrier Vert' ('Flageolet Green') is a small, light-green bean with a delicate, nutty flavor and a melt-in-your-mouth texture. 'Snowcap,' a huge spotted and striped tan-and-maroon bean, grows vines that reach up to 5 feet tall. 'Vermont Appaloosa' is tasty and a beautiful mottled purple and white,.
Sun and soil. Sow bean seeds directly in your garden around the last frost date in spring—beans get off to a strong start in soil that is at least 60 degrees F.
Choose a spot that's sunny most of the day. The soil should be well drained; otherwise, bean seeds can rot before germination occurs. Adding compost to your soil will help its drainage and increase its fertility. In fact, compost is all the fertilizer your beans need because they extract their own nitrogen from the air. Beans do this most efficiently when you treat the seeds with a rhizobial inoculant (available in many seed catalogs) before you sow them.
Water Well The key to watering beans is to keep the soil moist but not wet. Beans do well with drip irrigation, which conserves water (by getting it right to the plants' roots) and keeps the leaves dry (helping them to stay clean of rust and other fungal diseases). A simple soaker hose works equally well.
Harvest Ready When the leaves fall off the vines and the pods turn from green to brown, the beans are ready to harvest. Pull up or clip the plants and then place them in a cool, dry place for a few days until they're fully dry. Pluck off the pods, split them open by hand, and remove the beans inside, or leave the pods on the stalk and beat the whole plant on the inside of a barrel until the beans fall out. You can store the beans in an airtight container away from heat and moisture for up to two years, but you can eat them or even plant them anytime before then.
