It's time, May 24-25 the best, to plant corn, beans, peppers, squash and other above ground crops. i've looked foward to it for a while. Don't have much room but each year it expands a little. Now there's a trellis for some mixed pole beans and sweet peas with enough room for a couple of squashes and a few token corn plants at the ends. Beans, all legumes, gather nitrogen out of the air and make it available to other plants growing nearby through their intermingled roots. So planting nitrogen producing beans with hungry corn plants has happened for thousands of years. Hopefully in July and August we'll have lottsa fresh beans for eating, then come fall i'll take the best mature bean pods off the stalks and lay them out on a screen to dry. Next spring they’ll be re-planted as both an edible crop and nitrogen fixer for its neighbors. Harvesting often implies an ending, not in the garden, not for beans, it's back to the begining, not the end.
Beans are more than just a musical fruit, they are hugely nutrious, nitrogen fixers, easily saved for replanting, very productive in a small space due to vertical growth. Beans, be there or be square!
Saving older seed varieties may avert global disaster
Seeds of Diversity
