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susanzone5

beans not producing...why?

susanzone5 (NY)
11 years ago

My Fortex pole bean vines are beautiful and healthy but there are no beans and hardly any flowers. I'm in the Catskill Mtns of New York state. Temperatures have been in the 70/80's and rainfall has been perfect. There are no stubs sticking out which would indicate something eating them. There are very few flowers. I have pollinators in the garden, too.

Any ideas? This is a first for me in 40 years of gardening and I am really perplexed!

Thanks for any insight.

Comments (3)

  • tommyr_gw Zone 6
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I'm growing poles for the first time, I have ONE POD. I heard someone say it could be TOO hot. We've had a LOT of 90+ days this summer here.

  • subyz
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I was looking for the same answer. I planted Willow leaf limas which are supposed to be 'heat and drought' tolerant and I have lovely vines - no bugs, no rust, NO BLOSSOMS, NO BEANS... I read that I would get not one, but two or three crops in our long summers here in Tidewater Virginia. I am so disappointed. Any suggestions?

  • zeedman Zone 5 Wisconsin
    11 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    My Fortex are late as well, but so are most of my other beans, both pole & bush.

    After planting all of my beans on time & getting good germination, they just stalled. There was considerable yellowing & stunting for all varieties. I blame several things for this:
    (1) The main garden was not used last year (except for garlic) so the population of nodule-producing bacteria may have died out. However, my smaller home plots had beans last year, and they too had stunted beans in June.
    (2) I was very late laying down mulch this year, since my source (a local farmer) took a two week vacation. Normally I mulch when the beans have their first true leaf.
    (3) The heat & drought. I think I underestimated the degree of water stress caused by the heat, and did not irrigate deeply enough.

    After mulching & several deep waterings, most of the pole beans recovered, and are now growing vigorously - but several weeks late. It will be a race to get dry seed before frost. The only exception is Dolloff, which had almost no stunting & set pods in close to the time I would expect. (That Dolloff set large numbers of pods in the extreme heat is noteworthy.)

    The bush beans did not fare as well. Most are still stunted, and are slow to put out healthy foliage. There was one exception here as well: Wood's Mountain Crazy Bean. While it too was stunted initially, it sprouted new foliage very quickly after mulching, and the plants are now healthy & vigorous. It has some of the largest leaves I have seen in a bush bean. I'm glad I added it to the schedule this year.

    Runner beans have fared poorly, as would be expected given the abnormal heat. Bianco de Spagna has just hung onto life, but it is severely stunted, and shows no sign of recovering.

    Oddly enough, the stunting extended to most of my cowpeas & yardlongs as well. They were inoculated at time of planting, so that was not an issue. Nor should the heat here have been excessive. At first, I wondered whether I had herbicide over-spray from the nearby corn field... but the soybeans & limas were healthy. So I assume it was water stress for them as well. I have been watering deeply, and most of the vining varieties have fully recovered.

    As with the bush beans, the two bush cowpeas - Yancheng Bush and MN 157 - are still stunted. They are bearing in spite of it, though.

    It seems that whatever the source of the bean stunting, the increased vigor of the indeterminate varieties allowed them to pull out of it, while the bush varieties could not.

    As just mentioned above, limas and soybeans have grown normally, and are actually on track to produce larger than normal yields. Adzuki & Black Gram were stunted initially, but have fully recovered.

    There is one other possibility for the stunting I observed, which is Phytoplasma, a bacteria-like disease spread by plant sucking insects. The Seed Savers Exchange reports that much of the garlic in the Midwest was infected by Phytoplasma this year. Some of my garlic exhibited signs of the disease. I haven't been able to find any proof that this disease could spread to beans, but it would explain why the stunting was widespread in certain species, and absent in others.

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