Gadenin日本語Get the appPick every two or three days, without exception
Runner beans are annuals in habit even though the root is perennial, and their whole purpose is to ripen seed. The moment a single pod on the plant starts swelling its beans, the plant reads that as the job being done and slows or stops producing new flowers. This is not a small effect. A row picked over thoroughly every two or three days will crop for eight to ten weeks; the same row picked once a week will give you three or four weeks and then a heap of stringy pods.
That means picking is not really harvesting, it is maintenance. Go over the row on a fixed rhythm whether or not you need beans that day, and take every pod that has reached size, including the ones you have no use for. Pods you cannot eat go on the compost pile; leaving them on the plant costs you weeks of crop.
Look up as well as down. The pods that get missed are the ones hanging high in the canopy and the ones lying against a cane where they blend in. Picking from both sides of a double row and crouching to look up through the leaves finds most of them. If you find a fat, lumpy, over-ripe pod, take it off immediately even if it is useless: it is the one holding the plant back.
| Picking interval | Typical cropping period | Pod quality |
|---|---|---|
| Every 2 to 3 days | 8 to 10 weeks | Tender and stringless throughout |
| Every 4 to 5 days | 5 to 6 weeks | Some pods over size and fibrous |
| Once a week | 3 to 4 weeks | Most pods stringy, flowering stops early |
| Left two weeks | Effectively over | Seeds swollen, plant has shut down |
If you are away for a week, ask someone to strip the row rather than to pick what they want. Coming back to a plant that has stopped flowering is much harder to fix than losing a few pods.
The right size, and the few days you have
A runner bean is at its best between six and eight inches (15 to 20 cm) long, while the pod is still flat, the surface is smooth, and you cannot yet see the outline of the beans through the wall. Bend one in half: if it snaps cleanly with a wet break, it is right. If it bends like leather without snapping, you are already late.
The window is short. In warm weather a pod goes from perfect to stringy and leathery in three or four days, and once the fibers have formed along the seams there is no cooking that removes them. This is why frequency of picking matters more than judging size precisely: on a two or three day rhythm, no pod can get far past its prime before you reach it.
Length alone is a poor guide because pods vary. The reliable tests are the snap test and the smoothness of the pod wall. A pod that has begun to bulge over each seed is past use as a green bean, whatever its length.
- Snap one before you start Take one pod off and bend it. That single test calibrates your eye for the rest of the row on that day, in that week's weather.
- Pinch or snip, do not pull Hold the stem with one hand and snap the pod stalk with the other, or use scissors. Pulling drags the whole flowering truss off and loses the buds behind it.
- Pick in the morning Pods picked cool and turgid in the morning keep three or four days in the fridge. Picked at midday in full sun they go limp within hours.
- Take everything on each pass Clear the plant of every pod at or above size on every pass, including the ones you will throw away. Selective picking is what stops the flowering.
What to do with the ones you missed
Pods that have gone stringy are not compost yet if the seeds inside are still soft and colored. Split them open and cook the beans themselves as a fresh shell bean, which is a good thing in its own right, and put the fibrous pod wall on the heap. Pods left longer, until the wall is papery and the seeds are hard and rattle, are next year's seed if the plants were not grown alongside other runner beans of a different sort.
If you are keeping seed, choose one or two plants at the end of the row and leave those to ripen deliberately, rather than leaving stray pods scattered through the row. Concentrating seed production on a couple of plants means the rest of the row keeps flowering. Let the pods dry on the plant until they rattle, then shell and dry the beans another fortnight indoors before storing them cool and dry.
A glut is normal at peak. Runner beans freeze reasonably well if sliced and blanched for two minutes, and they salt down in layers of dry salt in a crock, which is the traditional handling and keeps them for months. Neither method rescues a pod that was already stringy when picked.
Keep a tally as you pick
Note the date of the first pick, the weight or count from each pass, and the date of the last worthwhile pick. Over a season the shape of that curve tells you whether your picking rhythm was tight enough: a row that peaks hard and then falls off a cliff was picked too infrequently, while a row that yields steadily for two months was picked properly.
Record the date you started missing pods too, because that is usually the week something else went wrong, whether that was a holiday, a heatwave or the row simply growing taller than you could reach. Next year the fix is often as simple as pinching the tops out a foot lower.