When to Pick Green Beans and How to Keep Them

Pick before the seeds show

A green bean is at its best when the pod is full length, still slim, and the seeds inside are only faintly outlined through the wall. Squeeze it gently and it should feel firm and snap cleanly in half with an audible crack and a wet break. Once you can see distinct bumps along the pod the seeds are swelling, and the wall turns fibrous and stringy within days.

For most green beans that is 10 to 14 days from the flower opening, and about 55 to 60 days from sowing. In hot weather it can be as little as 8 days, which is why a crop can get away from you over a long weekend.

Pick every two days, without exception

A bean plant is trying to make seed. The moment one pod succeeds in filling out, the plant reads that as the job done and flowering slows sharply. Strip every mature pod off at every visit, including the misshapen ones and the one hidden behind the leaves, and the plant keeps flowering. This single habit roughly doubles what a pole bean yields over a season.

Every two days is the right interval in the main season, daily in a heatwave. Pick in the cool of the morning when the pods are turgid; a bean picked in the afternoon heat is already limp and will not crisp up again.

1. Hold the stem, then pull Support the vine with one hand and pull the pod off with the other, or snip it. Yanking one-handed tears off the whole flower cluster, and that cluster would have given you more pods.
2. Look underneath and inside The pods you miss hang under the leaves and in the middle of a wigwam. Crouch and look up through the plant before you decide the row is picked.
3. Take the overgrown ones off anyway A pod too far gone to eat still tells the plant to stop flowering. Pull it and compost it rather than leaving it on.
4. Keep off wet plants Picking beans while the foliage is wet spreads rust and bacterial blight from plant to plant on your hands and sleeves. Wait until the leaves have dried.

Note your first picking date and roughly how much you get each week. Bush beans crop hard for two to three weeks then stop; pole beans run for two months. Knowing your own numbers is what makes successional sowing work.

Bush and pole crop on different timetables

Bush beans set almost their whole crop at once. You will pick heavily for two or three weeks and then the plants are finished, which is excellent if you want a batch for freezing and frustrating if you want beans on the table all summer. That is what successional sowing is for.

Pole beans start about two weeks later and then keep going for six to eight weeks or more, provided you keep picking and the weather does not turn. If you want a long season with little effort, grow pole; if you want a concentrated harvest to process in one go, grow bush. Most gardens are best off with a row of each.

Storing and freezing

Fresh green beans keep about five days in the fridge in a loosely closed bag. Do not wash them until you use them, because surface moisture turns them slimy within a day or two. Keep them away from apples and tomatoes, whose ethylene makes beans go rusty-brown and limp.

For anything beyond a week, freeze them. Beans frozen raw go gray and mushy because their enzymes keep working at freezer temperature, so blanch first: two to three minutes in boiling water, straight into iced water, drained thoroughly and dried before bagging. Done properly they hold their color and their snap for about eight months.

1. Top and tail, cut to length Snap off the stem end. The tail is edible, but removing it makes them pack more evenly. Cut long pods into 2 inch (5 cm) lengths.
2. Blanch 2 to 3 minutes Boil in plenty of water so the temperature does not crash when the beans go in. Two minutes for slim beans, three for thicker or flat-podded ones.
3. Ice bath immediately Move them straight into iced water for the same time you blanched. Stopping the cooking is what keeps them green and firm.
4. Dry, then freeze flat Pat them properly dry, spread on a tray to freeze loose, then bag them. Bagging while wet gives you one solid block of ice and beans.

Letting pods mature on purpose

At the end of the season, when you are no longer trying to keep the plant flowering, you can leave the last pods on to fill and dry. Let them go leathery and rattling on the plant, pull them on a dry day, and shell them for dried beans for the kitchen. Anything that is not fully dry should finish indoors on a tray rather than in a sealed jar.

Saving seed from those pods works for open-pollinated beans, which are largely self-pollinating and come reasonably true. Take the seed from your healthiest plants only, never from a plant that showed mosaic virus or bacterial blight, since both travel in the seed. Dry the beans until one shatters rather than dents under a hammer, then store cool and dark.