Pole Beans that Think
June 6th, 2010 · 6 Comments · Posted in Blog
Pole beans wanna get tall
Pole beans aren’t supposed to be sentient. So how do they manage to find my bean trellis?
It wasn’t long after the beans sprouted that they were sending their wispy feelers out, looking for something to climb on. It’s kind of creepy to watch them actually bend to locate the trellis I fashion for them out of PVC plumbing pipe and vertical lengths of string. They don’t have eyes (that we know of), yet they seemed to know exactly where the string was that would support their upward intent.
Soon those feelers were wrapping themselves around the string in a tight grip. They grow fast. It won’t be too long before they exceed the eight-foot height of my trellis and start doubling back in the other direction.
I have mixed emotions about pole beans. They form an impressive wall of green by mid-summer, something for us and passersby to gawk at. But we never seem to harvest the beans before they get stringy. My wife and daughter actually gag on them at the dinner table. I’ve been threatened at knife-point not to bring stringy beans into the house.
And then there’s the PVC trellis. My wife makes no secret of her disdain for it. “I hate that thing,” she said when she saw me making preparations to install it in the garden again. (I take it apart at the end of the season and store it in the garage.)
This year we are using rebar to train our tomatoes instead of letting them go wild in huge cages. The rebar seems to disappear in the background. The PVC trellis, which I’ve painted black, isn’t quite as attractive. And I have to anchor it with clothesline so it doesn’t get blown down in a big wind.
I suppose something made out of bamboo would be more fitting, especially for a garden billed as “sustainable.” But I don’t have the bamboo, and the beans need something to climb on now.
There’s always a project in the kitchen garden waiting for next year.
Oh… your beans look very nice. My bush beans should start producing next week. The pole beans just got their first true leaves. Peas I do know will languish if you do not give them something to climb on, and will never be as productive as those who have something solid to grab for support (no, do not ask how I know. I KNOW)
How about forgetting pole as green beans and going for shell or dry beans? There’ll never be a string to mess with… it does not take long for bean to become just a tad too big (or peas to become a bit starchy… not long at all… sigh). So if you decide to go for shell/dry beans, you need not worry as much about picking them when “they are just right”.
A lot of gardeners in our community garden use Sunflower remains for pole bean poles.
Although I usually think of the utility of a thing long before the aesthetics, I can relate to your wife’s reaction. We’ve started a container garden on our small back patio and I thought for a long time about what to use for our tomatoes to climb because the fenced patio is our only outdoor space, and I wanted it to be a beautiful sanctuary.
So silly that I worried. We just got a wire cage and it’s completely covered by the plants themselves.
Sylvie, we aren’t doing dried beans (the carbohydrate thing). I’m just going to try and pick these beans before they get stringy. I’m determined.
Keri, we do grow big sunflowers. We could try that. Neat idea. I wonder how long the stems last.
Sarah, we used to just let our tomatoes go inside big cages. But this year we’re training them as single-vine plants and trying more varieties. It’s fun to experiment.
Try growing Romano (flat) pole beans. The best I’ve found are Spanish Musica beans from Renee’s Garden. You can pick them small but they are maybe even more delicious when they’re larger and are excellent braised and well-cooked.
We’re using a cow panel with steel posts on the ends and one in the middle, as a “fence” for them to grow up. 16 feet long so you get a nice row of beans. Reasonably priced at Tractor Supply. Go to the TSC website and type in “cow panel”. Yes, it can be difficult to get home but they flex so we basically folded it in half like a clamshell and wired it shut to fit in my truck.