How to Grow String Beans

String beans are probably one of the easier crops to start with. They are resilient and yet produce lots for harvest. Ours generally give 2-3 harvest pickings and yields tremendous amounts! Be prepared for what you grow, make room in your freezers!

In our garden we usually plant a green bean (bush bean) and a yellow bean (golden rod). Makes for great additional color to your crop. There are many varieties of string beans that you can choose from such as pole bean, gold rush, rattlesnake green bean, and scarlet runner, etc.

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Many varieties of string bean also work well in a pot! Or if you choose a more vine like string bean, try it on a trellis!

Getting Started with your String Beans

To start off your year with your string beans, its best if you sow your seeds directly into the ground. In our garden we dig a line with our hoe about 2-3 inches deep and plant a seed 2-4 inches apart from each other and then cover them up gingerly.

They are nice and big so they are easy to handle, and great for the kiddos to help as well. If my kids help plant anything its the string beans and the sunflowers seeds. Also best to wait til its going to rain, that way its less work for you (if you plant a lot like we do). However, be sure to give them proper watering if there is no rain in sight, or if you are only doing a little patch.

Once your seedlings start to sprout, take care in the critters that will visit your garden. We always take a huge hit on our string beans due to the local deer and bunnies.

Fall Vegetable Garden Collection

We end up putting fencing around them in particular to help keep them critters out. However, we noticed that every time the deer have munched on the tops of the string bean plants they seem to grow back even nicer and give more of a harvest than the ones that weren’t chewed on.

Proper Care

String beans are pretty resilient but they do need the proper watering. And they need to be kept from weeds.

We don’t always get the weeds taken care of right away in our garden. We are susceptible to falling behind in our duties as gardeners, haha, but we have full time jobs still.

It does stunt your plant a bit but they will still produce your beans. We also have noticed that the bean plants that have weeds growing along with them, rely more on those weeds to hold them up.

So if you were to then weed the garden and take those supports out, the plant will look stringy and weak. We sometimes just cut the tops off the weed to allow the bean plant to still get the sunlight that it needs while still having the support that it grew to know.

To help with the weeds around our string bean plants, we like to use our grass clippings. This is great at keeping the moisture in and the weeds out. Just be sure to keep it off your plants, especially with freshly cut grass, it tends to be hot and can hurt your them.

Companions to the String Beans

Depending on the variety of string bean you are planting, you can have a bush bean (which is what we use) or you could use a more vine like string bean such as the pole bean. But either way they allow some of the smaller veggie plants to get some shade.

Cabbage, carrots, leeks, celery, marigold, sunflowers, potatoes, zucchini, tomatoes, peas, are all good companions to the string bean.

Check out my post on Companion Planting here!

Harvesting

Your bean plants will flower, they are small white flowers, sometimes purple in color. Then they will sprout the beans and then you can harvest your plants.

We grow a LOT of beans. So this task is a bit tedious for us. But SOOOO worth it!

They are also easy to remove from the plant. All you have to do is grab the bean at the top where it meets with the plant they are generally in groups. You can grab the grouping of beans and lift it up, it’ll just snap off.

Don’t forget to save for winter by freezing them. We use freezer Ziploc bags and take the ends off and cut them in 2-3in segments. Fill the bag so you have room to close the lock tight seal. Mark the veggie and the date and you are all set!

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