Green and Yellow Garden Snap Beans

Snap beans are the first beans to give me a harvest, about 45 days after they come up. I plant them early and often to get a continuous supply of fresh, tender pods. From early summer to the first fall frost, snap beans are ready to pick in my garden. I plant them every 2 weeks until about 8 weeks before the average first fall frost date. Snap beans are a good succession crop because they are so easy to plant and they sprout quickly in warm soil. When my spinach starts to go to seed in early summer, I till it under and plant a wide row of beans on the same day. A couple of weeks later when some of my early peas are finished, I till them in and plant another row of snap beans.

I have three favorite green snap beans: Bountiful, Tender- crop, and Tendergreen Improved. I don’t know how many bean varieties I’ve planted over the years, but Bountifulis still an old favorite. it produces early, and as long as I keep harvesting, I get more beans. Tendergreen is resistant to some major diseases, and Tendercrop is a heavy yielder for me. For yellow-podded snap beans or “wax beans,” you can’t beat Eastern Butterwaxor Pencil Pod. They’re delicious.

There are some purple-podded snap beans, too. A good one is Royal Burgundy. The pods are flavorful. As the name implies, they’re purple. (They turn green when they’re cooked.)

Southern gardeners sometimes grow a different type of bush snap bean, called “half-runners.”

They spread out more, but not enough to need staking. A reliable variety is the White Half Runner that matures in about 60 days.

I grow pole snap beans with tepees

There are a lot of nice things about pole beans. You can raise a bushel of them using just a few square feet of garden space; they have flavors distinct from any other bean; they don’t pass peak harvest time and get tough as quickly as bush snap beans; and if you keep them picked and fertilized, they just keep bearing.

Over the years I’ve experimented with all kinds of strings, wires, supports, and trellises for pole beans. Here’s my favorite: a tepee made of four poles, each about 6 or 7 feet long and about an inch or two thick.

I lay the poles on the ground and lash the tops of them together with rope or wire. Then I stand the tepee up with the legs 3 or 4 feet apart, pushing each leg 6 or 8 inches into the soil. I put 5 or 6 seeds around each leg, 6 inches from the pole and 1 inch deep. Later I thin them, leaving only three or four of the best-looking plants around each pole. An ounce of seed will be enough for four or five tepees.

In the fall I just pull up the poles (which I get from the woods), yank off the dead vines, and store the poles in the barn.

My favorite pole snap beans are Kentucky Wonder (which my dad grew every year) and Blue Lake (which I like to grow every year). I don’t have a taste for the long, flat, so-called Italian pole beans like Romano—but my friends of Italian descent say it’s because I’m French.

To side-dress pole beans, give each plant 1 teaspoon of complete fertilizer soon after the first picking and every 3 weeks after that.

Pick beans when they are about the thickness of a pencil. If large seeds start to form inside the pod and the whole bean looks lumpy, they have gone by and are too tough for best eating. Once a bean plant feels it has produced enough mature seed, it will stop producing blossoms and beans. Keep picking and your beans will keep producing.

Beans grow very quickly. After your first picking, you can pick from the same plant in about 3 days.

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