Hi Patty,

I plant beans on corn every year. Though I do think I should mention that for my main bean crop I grow on cattle panels, because production on the panels tends to be higher. Still, when grown together, the overall production between the corn and beans should be higher than if planted separately.

First of all, if you are going to grow sweet corn, of any kind, then do not grow a bean on it, except perhaps a half runner. Sweet corn has a gene in it which causes weaker stalks and they beans will almost without exception pull your corn down (way down). Also, once the ear is picked from the stalk, corn plants begin breaking down anyway. So, if you want to grow regular cornfield beans you would want to use a non-sweet variety of corn.

Here's a link to a thread in the vegetable forum, called "Corn for Meal & Grits 2" it has some info on growing beans on corn, as well as some cultural information on corn.

http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/cornucop/msg1011095625390.html

Also, below, is a link to a thread on cornfield beans.

A good many pole beans do well on corn. I've grown Tennessee Cutshort on corn a number of times. Interestingly, this variety seems to "tame down" a bit when planted on corn. Last year my star for this kind of cultivation was Cherokee Striped Cornhill Pole Bean, which is mentioned in the thread below. That's a cornfield bean from the get go! (albeit extremely vigorous). In these threads a number of other folks mention varieties, even Kentucky Wonder, which is a very fine bean.

In the link below, bella_trix mentions growing beans on corn in a similar arrangement as you mention. She includes a very nice picture.

Hope this helps!

George

Here is a link that might be useful: Cornfield Beans

Patty,

I agree with George in general terms, but because I garden in a very dry area, I can plant pole beans with sweet corn because, in our dry years, the beans do not grow vigorously enough to pull down the stalks. However, in a wet spring I won't plant the beans to grow on the corn stalks, or I won't plant the beans until the corn has tassled, pollinated and formed ears.

There are many varieties with more compact plants. One such hybrid I have grown and liked is Early Sunglow, which has stalks that get about 5' tall. In my garden it usually gives me ripe corn by Memorial Day if I plant sometime in the last two weeks of March. An heirloom that only gets about 5' tall is Golden Bantam. There's also a very dwarf variety of corn called Jade Blue that only gets 2' to 3' tall.

I also like planting pole beans to climb very large sunflowers, and for something like that, I'll use Giant Graystripe or Mammoth Russian sunflowers. Sometimes I grow beans on broomcorn or on an ornamental corn like Red Stalker or Painted Mountain.

Planting "Three Sisters" style lets you have 3 times the crops in the amount of space usually reserved for corn alone.

Dawn

Last year we planted McCaslin pole beans on a five foot fence and learned that five feet is not nearly enough height for them. Our cherry tree overhung the fence in one spot and the bean vines in that area climbed at least 15 feet into the tree and I couldn't reach the beans, so if you live in a part of the state with good soil and ample moisture as I do, you may want to follow George's advice to plant a half runner.

Thanks everybody. I just want to grow sweet corn to eat & beans to eat & maybe freeze some for my family of 2. I guess I don't understand how the beans climb or what to have them climb on since it sounds like I shouldn't use the corn stalks. I am planning to plant sunflowers so I could try those, but it seems like last year it was pretty late before they would have been big enough for anything to climb on them.
I know I'm jumping the gun. I don't even have the seeds for either yet & it will probably give me more info on the packages. I am just more confident getting info from you all because you are so experience & you know our special Oklahoma challenges.
Patty

Patty, you might want to try an experiment and plant a few on corn. In the link on Corn for Meal and Grits there's a picture of Cherokee Striped Cornhill Pole Bean, growing on corn. That bean easily reaches 10'. It produced very well on corn, even though if broke the corn down (after it matured its ears). That a bean grow tall is not a problem. A 10' bean vine will be okay on a 3 1/2' support, as long as that support holds it. It simply makes loops.

But growing on other kinds of supports (non-living ones) is generally more "sure fire," at least until one gets the feel for growing on corn or other living supports. I love the look of beans on corn.

George

Patty,

You can grow on 'poles' very easily if you have a supply of them. For example, if you have a clump of cane or bamboo growing on your property, you can cut and use them. If you have large cedar trees that need to be removed, cut off the branches, trim them, and use them to make bean teepees. I do that a lot because we have an endless supply of cedar trees that we are slowly removing from our property. Don't try it with willow branches, though, because they'll root into the ground and grow in your garden.

To grow beans on sunflowers, start your sunflowers as early as possible. You generally can sow the sunflower seeds a couple of weeks before your last frost date. If you have native sunflowers in your area, watch for them to sprout and plant your seeds as soon as the native ones pop up out of the ground. In good soil and with adequate water, sunflowers grow very fast. Our native sunflowes often sprout in March and can handle a surprising amount of cold weather.

Whether you'll have success with pole beans growing on any sort of plant--corn, sunflowers, etc., largely depends on how fertile your soil is or is not, how much rainfall you receive and how you time your plantings.

Clearly, what works for me in dry southcentral OK won't work for you if you live in an area like Dorothy and George do where the rainfall is much, much more abundant (last year, they got two-and-a-half to three times the amount of rain that I received).

Timing matters too. I like having beans later in the summer because I don't want to be picking, processing and 'putting up' beans at the same time I am harvesting lots of other crops like onions, potatoes, tomatoes, peaches and plums. After all, there are only so many hours in the day and you cannot harvest and process crops 24/7. Also, if you routinely take a summer vacation, plan carefully. You don't want to be out of town for a week or two at harvest time.

I plant a mixture of bush beans and pole beans most years. The bush beans are more for early to mid-season fresh eating, and the pole beans are more for fresh-eating later in the season and for freezing them for eating during the non-gardening months. So, for me, waiting for the sunflowers or ornamental corn or sweet corn to get tall enough to use as bean poles is not a problem because I want to be picking and processing those beans later in the season when I am not so swamped with the harvest of other crops.

Crop timing and management are key components of managing your edible plants so that you do not run yourself ragged trying to keep up with the harvest. For the best quality harvests, you need to be able to harvest your veggies at the best time for them and it can be a problem if everything ripens at once. The larger the garden, the more of an issue this will be, and it takes a few years or gardening experience to figure out what works for you.

Dorothy,

I am planting McCaslan pole beans this year but I'm going to grow them on my 7' foot tall garden fence, and I hope to add another 'layer' of fencing above that, so that the fence will be 9' to 10' tall.

One year I grew ornamental purple hyacinth beans (and I know they're edible but I don't eat them) on broomcorn and they all got about 12' to 15' tall before the weight of the ornamental purple hyacinth beans began bending (but not breaking) the broomcorn stalks. It did make a lovely huge 'wall' around the veggie garden, which then had only a 3' tall fence.

George,

I love the look of beans growing on corn too. Most years my stalks don't break, although they might bend, but then we are so moisture-challenged here that my beans most likely are not as lush as yours and Dorothy's.

Some years the beans move from corn stalk to corn stalk until it is a terrible mass of foliage, but the cats, dogs and small children (and, unfortunately copperheads and rattlesnakes) like to crawl into the corn and 'hide' under the shade of the rampant bean vines. I do try to plant the beans late enough that I can harvest the corn ears before they're covered up by bean foliage.

All this talk is making me eager to plant.

Dawn

Patty, You said you don't know how pole beans climb. Unlike pole peas which cling to their support with short tendrils arising from the main stem, the entire bean vine twines around its support. This is why you can grow them on corn and sunflower plants or poles or as I tried to do a woven wire fence.

One of my aunts who used to plant her beans on corn always waited until the first of June to plant the beans at the base of the almost fully grown corn plant.

I suspect that timing for planting beans on corn is more flexible if one plants on the outer edge of a corn patch, rather than on every plant or every so many plants, right through the whole corn patch. Plus, varieties (beans & corn) do seem to make a difference. I can't resist planting a hill or two of beans on the edge of almost every corn planting. It is just so beautiful. Here's a picture of Penny Rile Cowpea on Mesquakie Indian Corn.

George

George,

Nice photo and welcome back to the USA!

Penny Rile! Now you are making me hungry.

I do have Penny Rile cowpeas to plant this year.

I like the look of green plants growing up the cornstalks too. By the end of the summer, I usually have beans, melons, winter squash and even pumpkins climbing all over other plants, tomato cages, fences, etc. It looks crazy and disorganized at times, but it works for me.

Last year, I had a vine with a 12-lb. pumpkin hanging from a tomato cage it had climbed. I stacked a couple of empty cat litter buckets on top of one another and sat them under the pumpkin to support it so it wouldn't break the vine and it was a very pretty pumpkin when I finally harvested it in October.

Dawn

Someone gave me some Golden Cross Bantam corn seeds. I have no interest in harvesting corn, only in growing bean poles. Has anyone grown this variety, and will it be sturdy enough to support beans? What would happen if I snipped off ears as they began to develop? Would it make the plants stronger? Would I have the added benefit of disappointing the 'coons?

Perhaps you are wondering why I have no interest in harvesting corn? I live in a farming town. There is a local farm that calls me as they are headed to the field to pick. I drive 10 minutes and wait on them to come back with the harvest. From the time they first call to the time I have it all in the freezer is never more than 3 hours. And it's the best corn I've ever tasted. Too easy. Too perfect.

Thanks, patty, for letting me ride on your coat tails.

Seedmama

Seedmama,

I've only grown it a few times, and it seems like it never even made it to 6' tall, although it might have made it to 5 and 1/2' or so. I'm in a drier area, though, and it may be that someone in a rainier portion of OK will tell you it grows taller for them.

I don't think removing the ears will make the plants grow taller. The only advantage I know of to removing an ear or two (depending on the number of ears that any specific variety produces--because some make more than 2 years per plant) is that the remaining ear gets a little larger since it is not competing for energy with other ears.

You might be able to boost the cornstalk height a little with lots of nitrogen and water, but that same nitrogen and water would boost the growth of the beans too, so they still would tend to overwhelm the Golden Cross Bantam.

If you really want a tall corn for beans to climb, you'd have better luck with heirloom field or dent corns because they are "genetically programmed" (by nature, not through GMOs) to grow larger than most sweet corns. MacMex could probably tell you which field or dent corns attain a lot of height. I only grow them every now and then for ornamental purposes and, while I know they get tall, I can't tell you which one of them gets significantly taller than the others.

Dawn

Dana, I could send you some seed for Mesquakie Indian corn. That's a very sturdy plant and perfect for growing beans. On top of that, the ears are beautiful. There are pictures in the link below.

George

Here is a link that might be useful: Corn for Meal & Grits 2

I am going to try to do this with my Indian Corn and heirloom beans. I have seen this done before in very dry places out in New Mexico and it was able to work out just fine.

Golden Cross Bantam didn't get tall for me either and I'm over here in rainy eastern Ok.

George,

Thanks for the seed offer and maybe I'll take you up on it one of these days, but right now I have about 8 or 10 kinds of ornamental and dent corn to plant, and space for only one. : (

If it wasn't for the recurring drought, I'd pay someone with a tractor to plow me up a half acre or so and I'd do some serious corn planting, but with little moisture and the clay ground as hard as a rock, I probably couldn't get anything to grow there anyway. The area we could have plowed up for a corn patch is too far from the water spigot for irrigation, so it would have to be raised dryland, and this is probably the wrong year to try that. : )

Dorothy, Well, I guess it stays short by nature then, and not just because we're moisture-challenged here. If it didn't get tall for you.....it isn't going to get tall anywhere!

Dawn

OK. No to Golden Cross Bantam. Thanks for saving me from a disappointment.

George, I'd like to take you up on your offer. Wow! That is really pretty stuff! I won't be tempted to remove baby ears from that. I'll be the envy of the neighborhood. Same procedure?

Dawn - I am growing only the dent corns - any idea on ones that really love OK? I have Cherokee, Aztec, and some mixed painted already and so little room to plant them but I am going to try. Ever grown one of those?

Mitch,

I've yet to find a corn, any corn, that won't grow well here, so whatever you have will do just fine.

I grow Red Stalker a lot to use the red stalks bundled together as autumn decorations, and I grow mixed colors of ordinary broom corn for the seedheads for fall decor. I usually grow Painted Mountain or Wilda's Pride because I like the colors, but haven't grown a single field or dent corn, ornamental or popcorn, or a sweet corn either, that didn't grow well and produce nicely here. This is great corn-growing country. The only trouble I have is just raccoons, corn earworms and European corn borers, and very rarely a little corn smut in the rare rainy year. Well, and every now and then high winds cause the corn to lodge, but it doesn't happen very often.

George could advise you about how well the various Indian corns do here. He grows some heirlooms that he's very happy with.

Dawn

Okiegarden, there are a good many Cherokee corns out there. I grow Cherokee Squaw, which is probably related to White Eagle. I've only grown these two. But I suspect Dawn is right on about corn loving it here. It seems like we have near perfect conditions for corn. The only corn I've ever heard of, not doing well here, was a Native American corn from way up North. That tribe was relocated down here and pretty well lost their traditional corn because it apparently was day length sensitive.

The same might go for some of the Central and South American Corns. They might have trouble. But regular Southern and Midwestern corns should do fine.

George

George,

I did not know that some corns were day-length sensitive. So, that's one "new thing" learned today. Thanks for the 'lesson'. You know, I always say I learn something new here every single day, and here's just one example of that.

Dawn

When we lived in the sierra, in the Northern part of the Mexican state of Puebla, I once sent Glenn Drowns some seed to a local corn. He attempted to grow it out in Iowa. Whereas, in Mexico, this corn grew to about 12' height, maximum. It reached something like 20' in Iowa and failed to tassel until sometime in October, too late to make seed.

On the other hand, Hopi Blue flour corn will produce in the Northern USA, reaching something like 8-9' height. In it's native Arizona habitat I understand it is only about 4' tall. When I grew it in the Mexican state of Hidalgo it was only about 3' tall. But it did produce.

Some beans are daylength sensitive and some squash are also daylength sensitive. I suspect, for instance, that since the Seminole pumpkin is known to bloom late, that it too is somewhat daylength sensitive.

George

George,

That's fascinating info. You read a lot about daylength sensitivity in onions for example, but I didn't know about it in some beans, corn, and squash....although I do know that some beans always produce "late" no matter how early you plant them. Now I suspect the reason for that is daylength.

My Seminoles ARE always very late, but I never thought about it in terms of daylength. This year, I am going to pay attention to when they bloom and see what I can learn from that.

I want to post a thread screaming "Rain, Rain, Rain...I Got Rain!" (Two inches this week!) I can't....since the 'post' feature is not working, so I'll tell you here: we got rain. And, did I mention, we got rain? Two inches in two days. God has answered our prayers. We got hail too, but it wasn't big enough to hurt anything. I could enjoy the rain more if I did not know that people in nearby Lone Grove (and in the NW Love County communities of Courtney and Orr) suffered such damage from the tornado.

And, by the way, all this rain dropped our fire danger down to only "high to very high" which doesn't sound so great, but it is better than "high to extreme" or "extreme to critical". I bet our drought index numbers drop a lot, and I suspect the commissioners will not renew the burn ban next week, although I wish they would.

Hope y'all got some rain there in Talequah.

Dawn

A number of beans are daylength sensitive. I remember planting some, especially soy, in Hidalgo, and they only got about 4" tall before setting a little seed and quitting. Some beans are daylength neutral. They are completely unaffected by length of day. I have never found a daylength neutral corn.

Yes, I wanted to do a post too! I have no idea how much rain we had. Our rain gauge fell over last night. But I suspect we easily got four inches. It poured all night and the barnyard was a complete quagmire today. Both my rubber boots ripped this morning letting me "get more in contact with the land," so to speak. Yikes! That was cold!

Here's a picture of what arrived here this morning. We always joke that goats wait for the fiercest weather before giving birth.

George

George,

Congrats! They are too cute. I just absolutely adore kids and lambs--they have to be the absolute cutest baby animals in the world. Do these two kids have names yet? Thunder and Lighting? Mud and Muck? (Just teasing. I'm sure y'all will give them wonderful names completely unrelated to the weather.)

Sounds like y'all had a perfectly lovely storm and lots of rain. How nice that must be after the prolonged dry spell!

Why do boots spring a leak on the worst day of the year? I guess it is time for new boots.

It appears the posting problems are resolved as Droogie started a new thread a while ago.

Dawn

Let's assume I'm lucky enough to have some Mesquakie Indian corn seed, and I want to use them to trellis pole beans. I'd like some guidance on quantities. Do I plant the corn individually, and if so, how many pole beans would I want growing up each corn stalk? Or do I need to plant the corn in grids of four for maximum pollination, and if that's the case, again, how many beans?

Thanks a million,
Seedmama

What I do is plant my corn in rows. The rows are about 4' apart and the corn is about a foot apart in the row. When the corn is about 10" tall I hill it by using a hoe and pulling soil as high up around the little plants as I can. It's fine if only a few leaves stick up out of the soil. It is also at this time that I plant my beans in the corn.

At the above spacing beans really only do well on the outside edge of the corn patch. To plant corn on the inside rows one should plant fewer plants per foot, perhaps one plant every three feet.

I normally plant two or three bean seeds in the hill at about every 2' apart. They climb the corn plants on either side.

In the past I have planted a row of cowpeas right down the middle of a corn patch (meaning about 5 rows of corn at the above stated spacing). The cowpeas languished until the corn began to dry down. Then they started climbing the dried/drying corn stalks and produced until frost.

If you plant the corn in hills, meaning groups of plants, then I'd recommend a cluster of hills and that the hills consist of 3 to 4 plants each. I'd put a couple of feet between each hill and probably plant two to three bean seeds with each hill.

Bean varieties differ in vigor and how they respond to growing in corn. So keep notes and make adjustments in 2010.

Hope this helps!

George

George, that helps a lot! Based on the land I have available and the information you shared, I can see this year will be an experimental one. As you suggested, I will keep notes and make modifications next year.

Thanks for your help.

Seedmama