Ping Songbird: Green been planting question

[T]

Hi Songbird,

I got my green bean seeds in the mail few weeks ago. They sent millions of them.

How do you plant your seeds? How far apart? Do you expect the prune them out? Yada, Yada, Yada.

Many thanks,

-T

[songbird]

it depends upon what kind they are.

the soil needs to be warm enough, past all chances of frost.

i'm going to assume you are talking about bush beans.

i plant them in rows with 8-12cm between them. i don't thin them out. if they don't sprout or some get eaten by rabbits or whatever the first week or two i'll replant and hope those make it.

i just scrape a long straight shallow trench in the garden and walk down the row and drop seeds at the spacing i want and then go back with the hoe and bury them about 3cm deep but perhaps deeper or more shallow based upon seed size and my experience with those beans. once i have them buried i walk along and tamp the soil firm with the hoe and then water them in and then i keep the soil damp enough that they will sprout. i spray the rows with the hose once or twice a day to make sure they don't dry out. once they are up and growing i can back off watering gradually to encourage the roots to go deeper.

for me we don't usually get the beans planted here until around mid-to-late May and into early June. i have a few that i want to try planting earlier, but it is often hard for me to get everything done on time.

songbird

[T]

Thank you!

These are them:

Now to protect the sprouts from the earwigs

[songbird]

T wrote: ...

i don't have a problem with those here. once in a while a few cutworms get some of the seedlings, but my main pests are the chipmunks, rabbits and groundhogs and those i hunt to keep them from eating everything.

songbird

[songbird]

T wrote: ...

p.s. there are such things as earwig traps you can construct yourself. google it and do it.

songbird

[T]

I do have them, but I only catch a small percentage of them

I do not have issues with sprouts that are large, like zucchini.

But with small sprouts, the earwigs eat and burrow right down to the seed, like eggplant, tomatillo, and onion.

Are green bean seed sprouts large?

[songbird]

T wrote: ...

yes, so perhaps they'll be ok.

songbird

[T]

Awesome! Thank you!

[Mayayana]

"T" [e-mail] wrote

| Awesome! Thank you!

Me too!

[songbird]

if your garden has cutworms you may need to protect bean sprouts. sometimes chipmunks find certain ones attractive and ignore others completely (the edamame soybeans and a few others have been targetted here).

songbird