Well, it has been the year of the bush bean here at Frosty Garden! Our plants have become so laden with beans that they’ve begun to collapse under the weight! These are definitely the kinds of problems gardeners like to have! Not a bad harvest for a mere 12 square feet, with a second harvest definitely on the way!
We pulled the first phase of our bush beans tonight, several pounds at least. We were preserving tonight anyway, so we immediately put them through our standard blanch and freeze preservation method. (Link to more in comments!) We left any beans that were undersized as this initial harvest will help them plump up with the remaining weeks of the season.
We don’t stray too far into bush bean genetics. We’ve been growing Blue Lake Bush Beans forever and see absolutely no reason at all to change. This heirloom variety has been around for generations now, since at least the early 1900’s, and it’s not any wonder to us as to why it commands such popularity.
We mentioned it last year, but we’ll fill in the new folks or those that might have missed our feature post last year. We grow all of our bush beans in our sub irrigated containers, growing them quite intensively. We do six plants per bucket and that’s about the absolute max you’d ever want to do. Even with the sub irrigated containers as an advantage, they blow through a gallon of water every few days and are prone to frequent droughts.
Bush beans, and beans in general, are definitely among our absolute favorites among all the vegetables we grow. It still surprises us how good they are for being such an “easy” crop. Being a direct sow, even here in the subarctic, the require little more than frequent watering and fertilizer applications to pack on the pounds!
