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09/24/2009: "Bean Project 2009 Harvest"

Harvest season rolls on here at the farm... this past week I harvested most of the dry shelling beans. They're a variety called Etna, which I purchased from Territorial Seed Company. I would call the bean project a qualified success; success in the sense that I got back many more beans than I planted, qualified by the fact that it could have been an even greater yield were it not for the rabbits' predation.

You can see in the photo below that the rabbits nibbled about a third of the plants down to the ground before Lou helped me get the situation at least partly under control with some electric fencing.



The fencing didn't totally stop them cold, as I think after a while they learned to hop over/squeeze under. But I certainly can sympathize with Mr. MacGregor when it comes to the "wee beasties."

I was playing around with some variables in the bean project; in particular, I learned that it doesn't pay to plant in rows close together. I had some rows that were 15 inches apart, on the theory that this would shade out weeds, but in fact the bindweed was not discouraged much by close spacing. And the rows that had the larger 30" spacing were much, much easier to weed in the later season than the narrow rows. In the narrow rows I had to do a lot more hand-weeding, kneeling in the bean patch.

Other aspects seemed to work reasonably well; weekly weeding was enough to keep the beans ahead of the bindweed, and the drip lines were reliable and efficient in water use. I managed to time the harvest about right; a few of the bean pods had split and self-seeded, but most were still intact.



Incidentally, you can really see the carpet that the bindweed has become as I tapered off on weeding at the end of the season.

The result? About a bin and a half of pods. I haven't shelled them yet, but it should go pretty easily once they've dried just a little bit more. Each pod has probably 5 to 7 beans in it, and each mature plant grew 10 to 12 pods; you can see that the return for one bean is pretty substantial! No wonder cultivated agriculture caught on 10,000 years ago.