Nine bush beans per square?!?

In my copy of SFG's Crop Guide, it says 9 bush beans per square. My sister has done bush beans in their (traditional) garden and the plants struck me as HUGE!

Are their different sized varieties or something?

Nine is correct. The whole idea of sfg is to plant a lot in a little space. From past years experience, this works just fine.

Mine are already knee high and some of the tentacles are taller than that.

I'm curious to see what the production will be with my lima beans. The plants look great, but I also can't help but wonder if they might be too crowded.

I am far from an expert on beans, sorry but I will give you my opinion. Even though beans say they are bush beans, they do need some sort of staking. It does make it seem very crowded and I'm thinking its because it is a bit awkward to get to the bean pods. One person used stakes and twine to hold the vines
up a bit. Then they picked beans and moved the vine a bit to the side so they can see where they have picked. What I read for picking you start at one end and head down the plant. They move that plant a bit to the side and do the next. Then the next time you want to pick, you start at the other end. It was a bit awkward when I grew them because I thought it was just me that was making the vines fall over and get tangled some. I used sticks here and there to kinda hold up the vines cuz I just couldn't think of what else to do since I didn't have anything else. It helped some but it wasn't very pretty. This year I planted just around the edges of my box and will be putting up something for them to climb up. In the rest of the box I am planting corn. They are good to plant together and it will make it easier for me to pick beans, hopefully.

I just planted 9/sq today.

I find them to be a floppy sort of plant and put them in the back of the flower bed in a non-sf area. The hard soil holds them in place. I tried it in mel's mix with 2 to a square, they fell on each other or leaned out of their square, I just didn't like it. Honestly I didn't think of staking them duh, it should work just fine!

I've planted both four and five to a square...just have to see how crowded those boxes and adjacent boxes get...and how well I can find beans to pick.

UH oh, I planted 9 per square....
Although it seems that some of the seeds are just coming up with dead sprouts, perhaps this will thin them out a bit.

I plant 12 per square and let them lean on each other. Tie some twine around the whole square when they start to flop

I've planted 9 per square for years and it's worked fine for me. I tend to plant them on "outside" squares so they could hang over the side of my box if they need to. I plant 'Festina' from Park's Seed, and maybe different varieties aren't as well behaved. I've never staked mine at least.

I avoided the problem and just planted pole beans until I suddenly decided I wanted edemame. Pole beans are starting to climb, edemame is just breaking ground. But the experimental field peas are also a bush and are in long deck pots. This will be interesting.

Kay

walshevak wrote:I avoided the problem and just planted pole beans until I suddenly decided I wanted edemame. Pole beans are starting to climb, edemame is just breaking ground. But the experimental field peas are also a bush and are in long deck pots. This will be interesting.

Kay

I planted edamame and bush beans next to each other. I planted them both close to each other that I am not sure which one is sprouting big and the other is not. i am tempted to dig and check but am waiting it out. where did you get your edamame seeds from? did you use inoculant? I did. I found my edamame locally at home depot from ferry morse.

dianamarie03 wrote:I plant 12 per square and let them lean on each other. Tie some twine around the whole square when they start to flop

I sorta did something similar. I ran some twine between my plants (i planted 3 squares in a row) to give them some structural support.

Bush is a bit of a misnomer. My lima beans look more like mini-pole beans. I swear some of the "vines" are 3-4 feet long/tall and flopping all over one another.

Last year, with my bush beans (yellow wax), I was only able to harvest a handful here and there. Hopefully this year i can harvest enough at one time to eat and put away.

"I found my edamame locally at home depot from ferry morse."

Mine are ferry morse also. But no innoculant.