I agree with previous posts - my bush beans always put out heavy crops for a month, stop, then restart again and produce up until frost. In fact I cover them for protection from the early frosts to extend the harvest. They stopped producing earlier than usual this year due to heat stress. I am certain they will kick in again if we get a break from the heat - in fact just today I noticed new flower buds are developing. Keep watering them as needed while they are dormant if you are not getting any rain. I am currently harvesting my pole beans, which will carry me over until the bush beans kick in production again. I feel that planting both bush and pole beans is the best strategy for this very reason, if a person has the gardening space. Planting successive crops never really works that well for me because the same heat that shuts down production of the established bush beans also stresses the younger bush bean plants, causing them to stunt and produce mediocre quality beans. But it is always good to try different methods to judge for yourself.

First, properly processed green beans do not require acid and only need to be PC'd 25 minutes for quarts. There isn't enough information to know what went wrong. I'm not sure the canner was vented before the weight was applied. If they are "spoiling" then that would indicate the jars weren't sealed and that is entirely separate from the canning times and use of the canner. To determine the cause of that you'd have to go back to how the jars and lids were prepared, how the beans were packed and the lids applied. But the biggest issue seems to be that your co-worker hasn't invested the 5 or 10 minutes it would take to go to the NCHFP or one of the many Extension sites where the current USDA guide is posted to get proper instructions for use of a pressure canner and processing of green beans. You can't fix stupid. Carol

Oh. I thought different vegies needed different ratios of salt and water, for safety reasons. Is that all wrong? Different veggies may benefit flavor-wise from different brine levels but that is a matter of taste. As long as you use one of the recommended salt brine levels - see salt brine charts referenced above in Joy of Pickling (JOP) for example - then you can safely ferment any vegetable or mixture of vegetables. This, of course, assumes you use the proper fermenting techniques too - enough brine to cover the amount of vegetables, time, air temps, cover, skimming, etc. Dave PS: Randy - feel free to start a new thread. That way the OP won'r be getting all the emails if it turns into a long discussion. :) This post was edited by digdirt on Sat, Oct 26, 13 at 11:16

Since I see brown frass in the little tunnels and relatively early in the season, the tiny larvae may still be present, feeding in the bean tissue between the upper and lower surfaces of the leaf. You can squish them so that they can't grow up to be the very small adult fly, moth, or beetle, depending upon the species. Or, you can remove the leaf and throw it away (in the garbage) . If you end up with a terrible infestation, we can go to "plan B". I suggest that you take an affected leaf and hold it up to the light to learn a bit more about leaf miners. You can also use Google to do a tiny bit of research on leaf miners in general or leaf miners on beans.