The produce section is always brimming with a seemingly never-ending supply of vegetables. It is easy to assume they just appear there like magic. However, it’s definitely neither magical nor easy. Have you ever really thought about what it takes to grow the vegetables you buy each week?
How Much Should Those Green Beans Cost?
Let’s consider a bag of green beans. They are small, numerous, and grow pretty fast. What do you think…a couple of bucks should cover it, right? Let’s see what it takes to produce that bag of beans…
It’s winter time! Time to buy the seeds. If you’d like, you could try to save seeds from last year’s harvest. To do that, leave a lot of beans on the vine until they are dry. Harvest the dried pods at summer’s end and then manually open up the pods to shell the beans. This process will take many hours to collect enough seeds, but seeds are expensive so it’s probably worth the effort. Or…buy the seeds 🙂
Spring is here! Time to get the ground ready! Some folks till up their garden plots, others use no-till methods. Here at Trippy Acres we don’t till the established beds, so it’s time to hand weed the rows and make sure they have plenty of mulch/wood chips or a spring cover crop planted. It’s important to keep that soil covered. A broad fork is also useful to break up compacted soil…and get a great workout! Also, pole beans like to climb tall so make sure you add a trellis of some kind to the bed. It’s a necessary expense (and effort) if you want to grow pole beans.
The last frost has passed! Green beans like it warm, so now it is time to plant those seeds. Weed the bed again and loosen up a row. Add some compost (it’s pretty pricey, so try to create as much of your own compost as you can using compost piles…that takes a bit of ongoing effort but it is worth it). Plant those seeds one by one a couple inches apart. Cover up the seeds and give them a good watering. Over the next two weeks, keep the ground moist and hope a good percentage of your seeds will emerge as seedlings (there are always some duds). If a heavy storm washes them away, I hope you kept extra seeds because you might need to try again.
Summer is here! Bean plants are happily growing tall. If the deer munched them down to the ground (they love young bean leaves) plant some more. If it doesn’t rain a couple times each week, irrigate the row (most vegetables need about an inch of water each week to thrive). Water expenses add up fast, so hopefully the weather will cooperate. Consider trying to build a rainwater collection system to help offset water costs if you’re in it for the long haul.
The onslaught has begun! The Mexican Bean Beetle is a worthy foe. They look kind of like orange ladybugs, but they are definitely not beneficial for the garden like the ladybug. These beetles will turn green bean leaves into lace and will decimate the crop. We don’t use chemicals here at Trippy Acres, so we battle these beetles by hand, looking under each leaf and crushing both the grown beetles and the little yellow nymphs. If you miss any, or their egg deposits (and you will), the next generation will launch a new attack. This is a daily battle and it is not for the faint of heart.
The first beans are ready! Two months have passed (weeding, watering, fighting the bugs) and the first beans are finally here! Pick them by hand during the high heat of summer and fill a bucket with those beautiful long beans. If you wait a couple days too long, those beans will get too big/stringy and all that effort will be for naught so get out there every day to make sure you harvest the bounty.
Bag the beans! Wash the beans (if you need to) and bag them up. You finally have your first bag of beans.
Now, keep going! Keep harvesting, weeding, watering, planting successions, and fighting the bugs every day until you give up or it’s time to leave the last round of beans on the plant to dry for next year’s seeds.
The first frost is coming! Time to harvest those dried beans to save the seeds for next year. Clean up the garden bed, apply some compost and mulch, and/or plant a fall cover crop to keep the soil and microbes happy. Take a deep breath and then get ready to do this all over again.
SO…imagine this was your time, effort, and expense. What should those green beans cost?