I asked Hubby to go see if there were enough beans to be worth picking this morning. It looked like there were a few the other day just looking over the fence. Uhhh... Yep. Beans for Sunday Dinner and at least one bag in the freezer. Mind you, we only have 3 rows about 7' long each. Imagine if we had 4 or 5 more rows?! He has promised that next year we will have a garden at least twice the size of what we have now. Great soil!

Those are really pretty bush beans. Makes me wish I gave grown some this year. All I have are pole beans (McCaslan OP Pole Beans) and they are just starting to climb.

[mention]EdieJ[/mention], what is the variety of bush bean that you are harvesting?

I love fresh beans for dinner. I too so far only have pole beans planted. I am planting my bush beans after I pull my cauliflower for a fall harvest.

@pondgardner, these are called 'Derby.' Normally we grow Top Crop but scrolling through the Seeds'nSuch catalog I came across a description for these and they sounded good so I thought we'd give them a try. The plants truly do set the beans at the tops of the plants and were quite easy to pick. Unfortunately we never sprayed or dusted them so I will have to cut some bug holes out. We will spray them as soon as we get a break in the rain.

They look SO good! We're going to have to wait awhile until ours are ready...…

Linda

The first beans of the season are such a treat! ENJOY!

Nice clean looking beans.

Wildcat62, unfortunately looks can be deceiving. My husband did the old roadside market trick and put the nice ones on top. When I dumped them into the sink, most of them have bug damage, several so bad I had to just toss them. Makes me so mad. I told him they were going to need sprayed last weekend and he blew me off. So this afternoon he got out there and sprayed them well. We have lots more baby beans coming on and still more blossoms. So hopefully we will still have enough to put some up for winter. And the season is long enough that when these give out we will plant more. But still - !!!

I love fresh bush beans too, especially wax beans but hate the bending. I have grown them successfully in pots before and I could raise a pot to pick the beans. That worked though the plants eventually got spider mites which never happened when they were in the ground.

We picked a small batch of Derby this week. Fresh green beans are the best. We like to have young potatoes with ours but they are a couple of weeks away. My wife is in charge of the beans and Derby is OK, but I still like the old stand-by Blue Lake Bush.

Yeah, the Derby beans were pretty good but don't have quite as much flavor as other varieties. What they do have is ease of picking, which when one gets old & decrepit is a wonderful thing, and there were virtually no strings.