Terra Firma has a two-part Green Bean season. The first act gets planted in the spring once the ground warms up and dries out, and gets harvested over just a few weeks in late spring and early summer. Beans don’t like being planted in cold weather or rain, and are killed by frost. And while the plants don’t mind hot weather, the beans themselves have problems if it gets over 100 degrees. They grow crooked instead of straight, and they tend to get tough quickly.
The second act of our Bean season is longer, lasting from roughly Labor Day until early November. Any later than that greatly increases the chances of a killing frost. But rain also ends the season, by making the beans moldy and muddy. Wet weather — not just rain but even heavy dew like we often get in late fall — also makes harvest impossible.
Picking green beans by hand is a tedious task at best. But with wage increases in California dramatically outpacing produce price gains, it is also a great way to lose money. Twenty years ago we invested in a small-scale green bean harvester that allows two people to pick more beans in an hour than a crew of ten. The 20th century technology — originally invented in the 1950s — uses spinning metal “fingers” to strip the beans and leaves off the plants. A belt carries everything under a giant spinning fan that vacuums up the leaves and shoots them out to the side before depositing the beans themselves in a large bin.
Using the “Pixall”, we can harvest an acre of Green Beans in about 2 hours. This has the added benefit of allowing us to get the beans into the cooler quickly and keep them fresh. We sort them on a conveyor belt the next day, removing any broken beans and residual plant material.
If you’ve grown beans or seen them in a garden before, you may be wondering “Do the plants survive” this process? The answer is no. While many beans types are vining plants, we grow only “bush” varieties — as do most farms that grow any type of beans. They get about 3 feet tall and produce their fruit all at once. They all have to be picked within a few days of maturing or they will become tough and seedy. Harvest destroys the plants.
Like we do with many crops, we’ve spent lots of time testing out numerous varieties of green beans to find the best combination of traits: tasty, attractive, resilient and productive.
In order to harvest Green Beans for your boxes most weeks, we have to plant them every week. For the Fall season that means starting in mid-June and continuing until late August. Seed for the final planting went into the ground just a week ago. This year, however, some of the beans we planted in the record-breaking July heatwave were cooked — either the ground, or just as the seeds were emerging. We lost two plantings, so we will have two “Gap” weeks in harvest.
Green Beans are legumes, meaning they produce their own fertilizer with help from bacteria that live amongst their roots — one of the only types of plants to do so. This means they remove little or no nitrogen from the soil where they are grown. While not an actual “cover crop”, which actually returns more nitrogen to the soil than it removes, they are a “net zero” crop and are greatly beneficial as part of our overall crop rotation.
We do our best to make sure we have beautiful and tasty Green Beans for our CSA subscribers, but the weather can affect the beans right up until harvest. Extreme heat a few days before, or during harvest, will cause the beans to be both tougher than usual and more perishable. We’ll give you a heads up if they need special treatment.
Enjoy!
Pablito