Discover Real Green Beans
(Page 5 of 6)
Whether you decide to grow your own green beans or purchase them from a local vendor, take time to enjoy the many shapes, colors and flavors of real green beans.
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Choose the Right Trellis for Your Beans
Green beans twine their way up any trellis, then curve down when they reach the top. Be creative and resourceful when making a trellis for beans, but keep in mind these key points:
- Posts. Tripod, quadpod or A-frame supports work better than upright posts because the increasing weight of the vines helps anchor them in place. When they’re loaded with top-heavy vines, trellises attached to vertical posts are easily blown over by strong gusts of wind.
- Mesh. Instead of small-mesh plastic netting, use widely spaced string or 6-inch-mesh concrete reinforcing wire. You’ll cause less damage to the vines and drop fewer beans, because you can reach through the mesh to pick beans with both hands.
- Space. If you have a small garden, try to use the space between beds for your bean trellis. In a row garden, plant beans in double rows and install a sturdy trellis down the center.
- Height. It can be hard to pick beans from a trellis that’s taller than 6 feet, but you may want to go to an 8 foot trellis for long-vined varieties. Just use a ladder to harvest beans from the top of a tall trellis.
Battling Mexican Bean Beetles
If you grow beans, sooner or later your patch will be discovered by Mexican bean beetles (Epilachna varivestis). Cousins to beneficial lady beetles, Mexican bean beetle adults are about a half inch long, with black spots on their copper-colored backs. They lay clusters of bright yellow eggs, which hatch into spiny yellow larvae, on the undersides of bean leaves. The larvae scrape off leaf tissue, weakening and sometimes killing bean plants, while adults eat the leaves and pods.
In a home garden, the best control is to use fabric row covers to protect bush beans. “Beans are self-fertile, so you don’t have to remove the row covers to admit pollinators. You can wait until the beans are ready to pick,” says Dr. Kimberly Stoner, an entomologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, Conn. With pole beans, handpicking the pests and flicking them into a pail of soapy water is a time-consuming but effective control for Mexican bean beetles and Japanese beetles, which often enjoy bean leaves for breakfast.
If you have several plantings of beans to protect and are faced with a season-long battle with bean beetles, it may be worthwhile to buy and release a group of tiny, nonstinging Pediobius foveolatus wasps — natural predators that lay their eggs inside Mexican bean beetle larvae. This is not a fast solution to the problem, but as multiple generations of Pedio wasps increase through the summer, they gradually overtake Mexican bean beetles. The beetles also damage soybeans; in fact, a state-sponsored Pedio program in New Jersey, begun in 1980, has virtually eliminated the Mexican bean beetle as a destructive pest. Maryland also has a state-sponsored program, as well as an informative pamphlet available online that includes photos of the pests.
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