Grow Your Own Bush Beans
The beginning of warm season means the end of your cool season lettuce plants’ time in the kitchen garden (at least until the next cool season). Bush beans are an excellent, fast-growing crop to fill those empty spaces in your raised beds and be ready to harvest in the next 55 to 65 days. While pole beans are also great, they take a bit longer to grow and require some type of support (thus their name). Bush beans are more compact and stay low, making them perfect companions for cucumbers that need to vine up your trellises or plants like peppers that will grow tall.
To plant your own bush beans, all you need are a pair of pruners, some dry beans, and a jar of water!
Step One: Remove the Lettuce
Use pruners to cut the lettuce plants right at their base, rather than pulling out the whole root, to avoid disturbing the soil or another plant. Out with the old, in with the new!
This is also a great time to clean up your garden a bit, especially underneath your trellises, to ensure your warm season plants, like your cucumbers or peppers or tomatoes, have plenty of airflow and sunlight. Clear out dead leaves and other debris from your raised beds—those are just welcome mats for pests like caterpillars and moths. One challenge of intensive planting is staying on top of the garden to encourage maximum production of the delicious things you want to eat.
You could also take this opportunity to add some extra compost and even some mycorrhizae, which will help speed up germination and aid your bush beans in pulling nutrients from the soil to grow faster and bigger.
Step Two: Soak the Beans Overnight
Beans have a protective seed coating that protects them from germinating too soon. We can jump-start their growth by soaking them in a jar of water for about 10 to 12 hours.
Step Three: Plant the Beans
If you have a dibber for this step, that’s great! If not, you can just use your fingers to push each bean into the soil. Plant bush beans four to six inches apart, or about one every hand length.
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Planting bush beans is such an easy gardening task you could fit it into one afternoon. If you have a lot of garden space, you could plant one bed during ten spare minutes one day and come back to pop some seeds into another bed the next day.
If you’re looking for something to fill empty spaces in your garden and give you good production during the summer months, beans are just the thing to keep you growing! I wish you all the success and joy you can find in your own outdoor garden space!