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.

Does your friend still have some seeds? or did they all get eaten? If she has even a few, plant them this year. If she doesn't have many left you may not get enough this year to eat any, but if you save them again for next year you should get a large enough to crop to be able to eat & save more for planting. Beans rarely cross pollinate, so if you can get some from her, you should be able to plant them.

Mice will eat favas and peas (and I assume other beans) but I find they only eat them after they have begun to germinate. They eat the bean and toss the sprout aside. I get around it by laying small hole chicken wire very flat over the ground held down with stones so the mice cant get under it. Seems to work. This year I tried a new trick. I laid a lot of rosemary cuttings all along the pea row as soon as I sowed them This year none have been eaten, the pigeons haven't taken them and the pea and bean weevil hasn't notched the edges. Maybe coincidence but I am certainly going to do it again next year.

Annette, thank you for your informative post. That's much like what I found out when I began looking for seed to replace what I ran out of due to 3 successive years of failed crops due to weather and rabbits nipping the plants off at just above ground level. The beans that I originally had were some that I got in a seed trade on GW, but I can't remember who it was that sent them to me. It's been a long time ago. They were kidney shaped. My thinking at this point is that I got someone's "landrace" bean. Last year I grew a bean marketed by Terroir Seed as "Lazy Wife" and it was disappointing. It was a kidney-shaped white bean. This year's trial was "Lazy Housewife" from Shumway's. It was more of an egg-shaped white bean. George, thank you for that link. The beans I planted this year, when in the pods, do look like the ones in the picture on Sustainable Mountain Agriculture except maybe a little longer and wider, and it seems like they stay flat forEVER. By the time they look like the ones in the picture they are too fibrous to eat as snap beans, and yes, I have harvested the seeds, such as they are, and will be cooking them today before they have a chance to dry out, as many of them are small and will shrivel if allowed to dry. I will freeze them in the broth and add to vegetable soup this winter. They were delicious when picked young. But whatever variety I had at first was quick to produce seed. Considering that I have to compete with the grasshoppers every day that they hang on the trellis, being able to get seed within a shorter period of time is key. I've tried growing fava beans in the spring and the grasshoppers are not at full population yet. Even so, I can never get a crop due to something drilling through the pod into the bean. I've given up on fava beans and to this day have never tasted them so I don't even know if I would like them. I am going to try Lone Jack's Provider bush beans next year, though I might try another variety of Lazy Wife/Housewife if I can lay my hands on something else to try. I love home-canned green beans and have really missed not having any in the pantry. Maybe I can get away with growing both kinds at the same time, as one is bush and the other pole, and I will not plant them both in the same bed. A side note: when I was a kid, my mother believed "green bean juice" was ever as much restorative as was chicken soup. When stomach flu or some other such upsetting virus would make its rounds in my school till it found me, it would always be the first thing she offered when I thought it was possible to hold something down, lightly salted, and if that was successful, the next round was "garnished" with torn pieces of homemade bread, lightly buttered. If I could keep that down, I was pretty much well. :~} This is actually one of the main reasons why I prefer to grow my own seed. The other reason being economy. I would not be growing a garden at all, considering how hard it is to get a decent crop, if economy was not one of the driving forces. That and knowing that no chemicals have been applied. We are expecting our first freeze early on Tuesday morning. Oh, Annette, I just got an email telling me you have posted again, I will post this and then read your post so as not to lose what I've written here. Been there, done that. --ilene