Happy looking beans, misterpatrick. trishcuit - it seems to be widely assumed in the US that beans don't transplant well. But if you live in a place where it takes months for temps to reach high enough to germinate beans it is standard practice. I sow some runner beans inside to start with then later in the season direct sow them. I started 6 runners last week. When they appear I will sow 6 more and when they appear 6 more. AT the same time as I plant these out I will sow 6 in situ and when those appear 6 more in situ and then one more lot when they appear. That way I get a double row of beans 36 bean plants of different ages. The earliest sown will start to produce in June and then the other plants will continue in succession until frost kills the vines. I do not possess any lights but I do have a small electric propagator. I start the beans in a glazed porch where I also do my tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, brassicas and lettuces. I start green beans outside in June because I need so many more plants to get a reasonable crop.

What do you use to stake the ends of the EMT down? I've got 10ft EMT (used for deer fencing this year), was thinking of doing low tunnel next year. My cukes (if I ever get them planted - have 6 germinating in flat right now) will have to fend for themselves this year, but I've never had a problem with cucumber beetles. Fedco says H-19 Little Leaf can be kept under cover all season, doesn't need pollination (parthenocarpic). That was attractive to me (esp. since foliage is supposed to be sparse and I was worried about sunscald) but I just haven't had time to build a tunnel. I may rig something up. What type of zucchini are you planning on?

I've started my cucumber plants under Agribon for several years, as I also do for young squash plants. Insects (cuke beetles, squash bugs, SVB) would quickly destroy any vine crop seedlings I left unprotected. I had a lot of years that were total losses for squash & cukes, prior to using covers - and only a few minor losses since. When the cukes begin to bloom, I remove the covers & train the vines to a trellis. In my area, where there are wild cucumbers & pickle farms to sustain their population, cucumber beetles will always fly in from the surrounding area. I don't know whether they overwinter where their host plants were the year earlier, since I rotate the location of my vine crops each year (good practice for any crop). I've never had them appear under the covers. It seems that if I cover the vine crops early, and miss the first egg-laying cycle, only a few beetles appear later in the season. These are in far fewer numbers than I would expect otherwise, and the mature plants are healthy enough that they generally do little damage. However, they can still infect wilt-susceptible cucumbers, even mature plants. Growing a disease-resistant variety, or a parthenocarpic variety which can be kept covered, will overcome this. For wilt-susceptible varieties, spreading single plants throughout the garden - rather than together in one place - will increase chances for success. The bees can find them more easily than the beetles. While row covers themselves are fairly inexpensive, that can't be said for the methods offered of holding them down. Ground staples are pretty pricey, especially if you need a lot of them. The same can be said of the clips used to fasten fabric row covers to PVC hoops. I tried making my own ground staples, by cutting single-row strips from 4-foot-wide concrete remesh; it worked well, but they were a pain to remove at year's end. Personally, I would recommend just allowing the fabric to float over the vines. It will be pushed up by the foliage, provided that the cover is allowed enough slack for it to do so. The most economical way to secure a cover is to bury the edges. I spread the cover, use bamboo skewers to hold the edges in place, and cover them with several inches of soil. Water the soil over the edges to bond it to the fabric, and to seal the edges. Be sure to leave enough slack for the plants to grow. If you need access, leave one side unburied, holding it down with something which can be easily removed. I use 10-foot lengths of 1/2" rebar rod, but boards held down by bricks would work as well. Whatever is used to hold down the open end, the edges should be lightly buried after each entry, since the beetles will crawl under any edge left unsealed. Also, round off any sharp edges which might chafe against the fabric as the wind moves it back & forth. Another reason I found that I like using soil... it has no sharp edges. ;-) The buried cover will resist all but the strongest winds, since it will tend to lay flat. Oh, and it will keep out slugs as well, unless they were there before the cover was applied. Maybe a little OT, but one last note, regarding cucumber beetles. My observations seem to indicate that the use of fertilizer on vine crops increases their attractiveness to cucumber beetles. They locate their host plants by scent, so it may be that the accelerated growth caused by fertilization increases the production of the chemicals which attract them. It doesn't seem to matter if the fertilizer is chemical or organic. Attacks by other insects (such as squash bugs on squash) also seem to encourage attack by cucumber beetles. I don't protect all of my squash with row cover, since Tromboncino is naturally resistant to SVB & can fight off squash bugs & cuke beetles on its own when healthy. If I find a swarm of cucumber beetles on a young Tromboncino vine, there is nearly always an adult squash bug somewhere on the plant... so the beetles actually act as my "early warning" for the first squash bugs. I've inspected all plants several times when I first observed this, and only the plants with squash bugs had swarms of beetles attacking them. It allows me to catch the squash bugs early, before they have laid eggs.

When I grew cucuzzi it "escaped" from the garden, grew up and over the garden fence, and then climbed high up into the nearby trees where, of course, I couldn't reach them in order to pick them while they were a reasonable size. The squash high up in the tree grew quite long. Finally, a neighbor who could see the green "things" hanging from the trees while driving up and down the road asked me why I had so many green tree snakes (a somewhat common native green non-venomous snake is common in our area) hanging upside down from the trees all day long. I guess from the road, the sepent gourds really did look like serpents! In the fall, I pulled the vines and gourds down out of the trees and gave the gourds, which were very hard-shelled and dry by that point, to the dogs to play with. They carried them around, tossed them in the air, chewed on them, etc. The next year, we had cucuzzi growing on the fence around the dog yard, with the plants having sprouted from seeds the dogs scattered around the dog yard while playing with their old, dry, cucuzzi gourds. I had thought I'd harvest and use the cucuzzi but the dogs harvested theirs as squash whenever they felt like it and played with them and ate them. Even my dogs are gardeners, it seems, and one of them likes green tomatoes, so he is banned from the fenced garden.