When to sow beans?
- Botanical name
- Phaseolus vulgaris
- Family
- Fabaceae
Beans are sown outdoors from May to June, 3 cm deep. They are harvested from July to October.
Beans are annual plants. The edible parts are the fruit and seeds.
In cold, wet ground bean seed rots.
The variety decides whether the crop is a bush bean, which grows to 45 centimetres, or a pole bean, which climbs to 3.6 metres. Pole beans are sown at a pole they twine around, bush beans in rows. Pole beans go on cropping for weeks after the bush beans have all been picked.
The seed contains phytohaemagglutinin, including the seed inside young pods. Cooking destroys it, while raw or undercooked seed causes severe nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea.
Beans through the year
- indoor sowing
- transplanting
- outdoor sowing
- harvest
In short
The last frost is not on the same day everywhere, so the recorded weeks are a guide and not a date.
Growing conditions
Are beans toxic to people?
When raw, toxic to people, toxic parts: seeds.
Companions in the bed
Companion planting is tradition and not an agronomic claim. What is recorded is which pairs sources recommend and which they advise against.
Next to cucumbers the neighbours go to the edge of the bed.
Kohlrabi is a quick catch crop.
The pumpkin is part of the Three Sisters. It holds for squash in general, so for the courgette as well.
The sunflower is a living support instead of a pole. It works only if it is sown a few weeks earlier.
Corn and beans are part of the Three Sisters, a practice thousands of years old. The bean has to be a climbing variety and the corn tall enough beforehand.
- “Widely cited” means the pair is named by three or more independent sources.
- “Cited” means the pair is named by one source or two.
Pests and diseases
Listed here is every problem for which the sources name this plant as a host. The problems are not listed in order of how common they are.
- Signs
- Small entry holes in the stem with borings that look like sawdust. Above them the foliage wilts or the stem snaps.
- Prevention
- In autumn remove or shred the stems in which the caterpillars overwinter: cut them off at ground level and mulch them, plough them in or carry them off the bed. This is the strongest measure, because it takes the pest's winter quarters away.
- What to do
- Split the attacked stem below the entry hole and destroy the caterpillar. On a small bed this is workable and more precise than spraying, which does not reach a caterpillar inside a stem anyway.
- Signs
- A white, floury coating spreads over the leaves, first on the lower and older ones. The leaf under it yellows and dries up. The fruit stays small, because the plant loses leaf surface.
- Prevention
- Plant resistant varieties, leave an airy spacing and sun, and clear the debris at the end of the season. Unlike most fungi it is not helped by wet foliage, since it spreads in heat and high air humidity, in a dry summer too.
- What to do
- Oil products meant for powdery mildew on the squash family work on contact. They do not cure a leaf that is already affected, but they stop the spread to healthy ones. On herbs cut the affected shoots back instead, since the new growth comes clean. On ornamental perennials what is left is spacing and moisture.
Check the registration and the label before use.
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Related plants
The plants below are in the same botanical family (Fabaceae).
Sources about the plant: Bayerische Landesanstalt für Weinbau und Gartenbau, Clemson Cooperative Extension, GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, KGZS Kmetijsko gozdarska zbornica Slovenije, KGZS Zavod Ljubljana, NC State Extension Plant Toolbox, Royal Horticultural Society, Semenarna Ljubljana, University of Illinois Extension, University of Maryland Extension, Utah State University Extension, Wikidata. Checked between 14 and 28 August 2026. The problem descriptions also draw on: EPPO Global Database, UF/IFAS Extension, University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension.