How to Grow Kentucky Blue Beans

Begin preparing your soil as soon as the winter frosts are over. Map out an area of roughly 100 square feet in your garden or backyard. This is a large enough space to grow enough beans to keep you well supplied for an entire year.

Weed the soil thoroughly and break up any hard surface earth with your shovel and hoe. Enrich the soil with a 5-10-10 solid pellet fertilizer. This means that it is composed of 5% nitrogen, 10% phosphorus and 10% potassium. Too much nitrogen will cause the beans to flower, but not generate any bean cases. Distribute one pound of pellets over the soil and work it in well with the hoe.

Begin planting your beans as soon as the average daily temperature exceeds 60 degrees fahrenheit. Plant a single row of seeds, 1 inch deep and 2 inches apart from one another. Wait a full week before planting another row. Doing this will stagger the rate of maturation so your beans won’t be ripe all at once, ensuring a steady supply throughout the year. Each row should be at least 2 feet apart to prevent the plants from fighting for space. It also makes watering between rows easier.

Water the seeds lightly once a day, skipping any day when it rains. The first seeds should sprout after two weeks. You will have no further need to fertilize them, so just keep an eye out for insects. You needn’t worry about fungi as this breed is very resistant, but they are prone to bug problems. Truthfully there is no perfect insecticide one can use on plants you intend to eat. All the best pesticides kill people just as well as they do bugs. In my experience a good organic pest preventative is a 3:1 combination of lemon juice and hot sauce. The acidity of the lemon juice combined with the capsaicin in the hot sauce will keep most vegetable-loving bugs away. Be warned, however, that this mix can be washed off when you water or during rain, so you will have to reapply periodically.

Harvest the beans roughly 70 days after planting. Do not under any circumstances leave the beans on the bushes to ripen, mature, or simply rot. Once all the pods are between six to eight inches in length their growth rate will slow to a crawl. Not only that, but the plant will put forth no new pods while mature pods are still present. So make sure to get all the pods in one go to ensure a healthy rate of continuous production. With the short growth cycle you will get several crops from each growing season.