From little beans come yardlong beans!

My long bean plants seem happy – they’ve wound their way up the vertical supports, and I’ve been training them to grow onto the horizontal surfaces. The thing about these plants is that they just want to keep growing upwards, and they can sense there are higher surfaces around, and keep reaching for them. I foresee a constant battle with them on this issue. Somehow, I doubt they care that the higher things are big fruit trees and a shed roof; they’re just conditioned to grow higher and higher.

That said, I think I’ve done better this time with the higher trellis. It’s taller and has more growing area than the last one. I quite like the sight of the bean plant stems winding their way from ground to about 1.7 metres up, with the stalks of triple leaves poking out at regular intervals. As the growth gets thicker, I expect to see a nice vertical wall of green.

Over the past week, new growth has emerged from many of the leaf nodes, especially those higher up. Yup, it’s the flowers starting to form, and today I finally saw the first bean babies! As last year, the beans appeared in pairs (I’d love to have those that appear in bunches!), looking very much like some kind of super hero rearing up and roaring – as they should, because these tiny, less than 2cm long beans have the potential to grow 3,000% to 60cm or more. Wow. I can’t wait to eat these fresh from the garden and not have to buy them to eat them!

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