Stupid birds ate my beans along with my peas. :( I did have planted yellow bush Carson' yellow and Gold Mine. I also planted Delinel green bush. Not impressed with much this summer. :( There is always next year..........:)

Ginny

PS I did order some dry beans for next year. Thought I'd give them a try.

My bush beans (just standard green stringless and blue lake bush) are just starting to flower, we better have a nice August. C

Same here green sringless bush, I usually don't care about what it is in the green bush beans, get whatever Canadian tire has in bulk farm package, but I look for the,..I think it's called Purple Burgundy, they didn't have it in bulk.

Burgundy is starting to set beans, the greens I checked tonight and there are loads of them to pick.

I'm surprised that some of the broad beans have put out some large pods already.

Pole beans I didn't put in this year, I usually set out a year or two.

I'm growing Jade and another green bush bean - we had our first (yummy!) feed of the Jade on Monday and there's a whole bunch out there of both varieties to pick tomorrow.

I'm having slug trouble on the bush beans :(

I'm having slug trouble on a lot of stuff :( Stupid slugs.

I'm also growing pole beans for the first time. They are now about 8' tall and have not yet produced but have started flowering.

The stringless bush beans have fed us twice this week.

Pole beans this year are about 6 feet high so far. I put a pole beside them yesterday and told them to start heading south as I don't want to use a ladder when they're ready =:) I didn't have much luck last year with Scarlet Runner, but can't find the package for whatever is growing right now....

No evidence of slugs here this year at all thank goodness.

We've been eating bush beans for 3 weeks, rattlesnakes for 1 week. It's at the point now that I can't keep up and I'm having to freeze them.

I'm having trouble finding slugs this year. It's raining today for only the second time in July. I wanted slugs for my daughter's leopard frog. Even my hostas only have a couple of holes in them.

After having great luck with pole beans last year I never got around to planting them this year, which may have been a mistake since it's looking like a bad year for slugs and they love low-hanging bush beans. My bush beans got set back a couple weeks by hail but recovered well and with all the warm weather I think they are now actually a bit ahead of last year. Just did the first major picking today of green and yellow beans (last year they started around Aug. 10). Also growing a new variety, a yellow bush romano bean. It looks to be about a week slower than the other beans, but gets these interesting flat yellow pods... picked about 3 dozen pods today, going to try them for dinner tomorrow...

I picked a few beans yesterday. This is the best crop i've had in years! I thought the green beans looked a little skinny, so i had to find out what the heck i had planted, and sure enough, they're a filet bean called Nickel. I picked an ice cream pail full of them and one of the yellow beans (just Golden Rocky i think), and for them, i'd only done half the row. The Royal Burgundies look like they're producing well too, but i didn't get to them. Now it's rained again. Hopefully things will have dried out by Monday.

I know this is a late reply but it might still help for this years garden!

I like to grow "Gold Rush" yellow wax bush beans from Veseys. The are not stringy except for when they get too big & produce an abundance of beans. I highly recommend them. I think I've seen them at West Coast seeds as well.

Pic #2 :)

This post was edited by Thirsty_Dirt_77 on Sun, Mar 10, 13 at 0:56

Looking good!
The only drawback in yellow beans, they have hardly any vitamin A.
I'm not suggesting not to grow them, all beans are good for you, my mom grew them in Switzerland and I have grown them here, I was amazed how loaded they were. Well...it's not mom who said the dark veggies are better for you,...the other way around LOL.

These are my grandkids (and granddog) showing some of the beans they helped pick this summer. Later that day we had a taste test and they chose their favourite bean. It was an amazing harvest last summer for sure!

That is good to know that the Rattlesnake pole beans are worth growing..this is my very first year growing vegetables (!) and I wasn't sure what to put in. I also plan on growing green bush beans because my husband adores them. And I make sure to plant lots of any veggies that my hubby actually likes!

Love the photos, still have to learn how to do that. As I said I grew the regular old green stringless bean and Blue Lake bush last year and Blue Lake out preformed by far and they were straighter. Just a note from my records, will grow them again this year to confirm results. Cheryl

Last year I grew Early Riser pole beans. They were awesome! ( I've only grown pole beans once before, so I'm not comparing to much) It amazed me that I could grow beans that were about 10 inches long and could take up your whole dinner plate if you weren't careful :)

Are the Rattlesnake that big I wonder?

Weeper, you're going to love growing your own vegetables. Nothing beats the freshness and knowing where your food came from :) Plant lots if you have a freezer.

nutsaboutflowers ... I'm glad you mentioned 'Early Riser' ... I had grown these tasty pole beans years ago and still have some seeds around and sure hope they're viable!

Terrance

NAF - my limiting factor will be the size of my garden. I'm digging raised beds, and last year I was only able to finish 4 of them; 2 are 4x10 and 2 are 4x15..I'm gonna fill them up and dig more this year!

Thanks for the info on Early Riser, I'll see what I can find this spring.

Weeper, we're getting off topic here but......

Are you sure you need raised beds? I have horrible clay soil, and my beans, tomatoes, etc., grew just fine last year. I also grew vegetables years ago, long before I had even heard of raised beds, and I had lots of tasty veggies. All I'm doing is adding small amounts of compost and in the fall I add chopped leaves and grass.

Is your soil on your farm that poor? I dug a patch of lawn out last year and it was a lot of double digging. Are you doing all yours by hand like I did? I think I must be a farmer at heart, LOL!

We have heavy clay as well and over the years have kept amending our garden area with black dirt, manure, leaves, sandy loam, etc. It has worked really well and the soil is fairly rich right now - in some areas!

Hey NAF - I may not "need" raised beds, although our soil really is that awful. I grew up near Moose Jaw and my Mom always complained about her "rock hard" soil, but when I moved up to where I live now(near Watrous) I realised our soil back home was awesome LOL. It is alkaline, chalky-colored literally rock hard crap. We have to use a pick ax to break it up.

I should clarify that by raised beds, I mean the soil is raised about 6-8 inches above the level of the surrounding ground, but I'm still using the original soil. I've just double-dug it and added amendments. I didn't haul in all new soil or anything!

Improving the soil and keeping it good will definitely be an ongoing process!

So why, you ask, am I doing raised beds? I love the look of formal english gardens, so that is how I'm designing my veggie garden. Once I have all the beds dug, I plan to put down gravel between the beds, and I have a center, circular herb bed. Instead of a boxwood hedge around the outside, I plan to plant peonies. Hope it looks pretty someday!

Weeper I also have raised beds about the same as yours, I did it so I could harvest and work in the garden even after a rain and I can get things in a little earlier. I have mulch between my beds. I'm working on anther area and somehow trying to tie them together, The things I don't put in the beds are the peas I need way too many and I always have some extra potatoes shoved in somewhere. And too get back on topic I picked up more regular beans at the dollar store yesterday, I just simply can resist seed packages. Cheryl

Marcia - great photo!

Such a summer 'teaser' photo, too - on a cold March morning with -26 temperature!!!! We can only dream...

It was warm that day too, probably +26 as opposed to the -26 today (actually -28 here earlier this morning). Certainly not what we were getting last year at this time!

We have no power this morning, for about 6 hours, not bad but now I have to try and defrost my auto-waterer for the horses and cows. Gotta love winter in the country. C

I grew Rattlesnake pole beans for the first time last summer. They were a definite hit and helped extend bean season for us. I also grew the yellow and green bush varieties. I bought the Rattlesnake bean seeds at Canadian Tire, but they are available where ever McKenzie Seeds are sold; you'll find them under seeds for young gardeners.

Weeper, my in-laws farm out your way. :) We're east of S'toon ourselves. I My favs right now are poles. We like Fortex best for flavour, but we find that Emerite freezes nicer for winter. Last year we tried Purple Peacock and despite all the storms, high winds and hail of last summer, they produced loads of beans. We liked them fresh, but they haven't held up in the freezer like Emerite and Fortex. We won't be growing them again. We've tried Blue Lake Pole as well and I have to say they were the worst beans I'd ever grown.

I love the runner beans, but the family doesn't. I prefer Painted Lady over Scarlet Runner. Neither my husband or I had ever seen a hummingbird in person until I started planting the runners. Now we have them all over and have even spotted little youngsters. :) But back to the beans...

ThirstyDirt77, I've grown Gold Rush before, but prefer Gold Mine. They produce more in my soil. We grow only a few yellows for the texture... they're sooo tender. Royal Burgundy is great; they hold longer on the plant I find, which is nice when a person is busy. They freeze well, too. Early's sells an Improved Tendergreen that freezes really well for us. They're kind of boring flavour-wise, though, compared to the poles. As far as bush beans, I've grown: Provider, Matador, Tema, Labrador... I'm sure there's been a couple more, but I can't think of them at the moment. I haven't fallen in love with any of them. I'm still looking for the best green bush bean for our garden.

Last year was my first time growing a dry bush bean - Orca. I grew only to expand my seed quantity last year, so we haven't tasted them yet. I'll be able to plant a lot more this year so we can try them out.

I direct sow the bush beans, but start all my pole beans inside in soil blocks. As soon as they sprout, they go outside and they get transplanted into the garden about 10 days after they were seeded. I found that doing this let me start picking Emerite and Fortex the same week the bush beans started producing and they continued right until frost, unlike the bushes. I started Orca inside in the soil blocks as well because I was worried there wouldn't be enough time for them to dry down. I'll probably do that again as it's not a big deal with the soil blocks.

I ordered 2 types of beans for this spring from veseys - I don't have much room for this year, so I'll have to just try some of each.
Kentucky Blue - pole bean(hopefully they're good..anybody try them?)
Lewis - green bush bean(again, if anybody has tried them, let me know if they were any good.)

There are so many choices it's overwhelming.