How are you cooking them? If they aren't stringy to begin with (raw) then it is either that you are letting them mature on the vine too long or it is something in the way you are cooking them.

What variety are they? Most varieties now days are stringless but some of the older stringbean varieties are still around too. But either way they need to be picked while still young and tender and before they begin to fill out. Once the individual beans begin to develop in the pod they will be stringy.

You can learn more about that aspect over on the Vegetable Gardening forum.

Dave

I'm boiling them. maybe I don't know when to pick them, but this last time all of them were stringy even the ones that were not seedy at all. so I wonder if boiling them too long is the problem?

We have grown half runners for years with good results.
( DH is a country boy and always plants them around the corn after it comes up, so they can climb up the cornstalks). This year it has been terribly hot and the beans are so tough and stringy they are all but inedible. I always string them well before cooking, but the last batch was so bad we pretty much had to chew out the pulp and then spit them out, even though I cooked them for over an hour. We still have a lot of beans out there, I'm thinking of just letting them dry and shelling them out. It has to be the weather, they are the same beans we have always grown. I have bad luck with bush beans,the rabbits always get them.

To me it sounds like the variety. I use Blue Lake bush beans. They are the only kind we plant.

This was the worst bean year I can remember. We raised a new, highly touted variety, and some of our old reliables. ALL were terrible. Tough, fuzzy texture, and practically tasteless. Cardboard came to mind. We tried each variety, my daughter tried some, same result. Gotta be the extremely hot weather. We finally just let 'em go, and I mowed the vines off. No canned beans for us this year...