I hope you'll keep us posted on the germination percentages you get and how quickly those beans germinate.

Are you familiar with Tom Clothier's Seed Germination Database? In case you aren't, I'll link it below. I've learned so much from his database on exactly what soil temperatures give you the highest percentage of seeds germinating in the shortest number of days. It has helped me learn some important things....like how it is best to not sow bean seeds too early in spring or they'll germinate poorly....or why beet seeds take so long to germinate when we plant them at what we are told is the "right" time. Because of what I've learned from this database over the last 10 or 12 years, I plant when the soil temps and air temps are in the right temperature range and not when a calendar says I should be planting.

I've grown many Three Sisters gardens, and sometimes Four Sisters gardens with the fourth sister being sunflowers, and the beans can overwhelm modern-day hybrid cornstalks by outgrowing them, burying the corn ears underneath the crazy bean foliar growth, etc. I have to use a really tall sturdy corn like Texas Honey June or one of the field, flour or dent corns that produce larger, stronger stalks than most hybrid sweet corns OR use half-runner beans (which despite their name still can climb 6-8' some years). Otherwise, I end up with happy bean plants weighing down corn plants and sometime bending or breaking the stalks. I like raising the Three Sisters together, but it takes a while to find the right combination of beans and corn that grow well together without the bean plants overwhelming the corn. My pumpkin, though, always is Seminole because it runs wildly through the corn field and happily exists on whatever water it gets.

Some years I use southern peas instead of beans in the rows of corn too. That can work out even better because the corn usually is fairly tall before I sow the southern peas (since corn likes cooler temperatures but southern peas need warmer ones for good germination). It is pretty easy to mature a corn crop and harvest it before the southern pea plants climb to the tops of the corn stalks and beyond.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: TC's Seed Germination Data Base

Hello Dawn,

As usual, you are a fountain of knowledge. Thanks for all of your help.

My goal for the test was simply to figure out if that old seed was still good. We plan to grow a plot of corn with pole beans. That plot may be four rows at four hundred feet long and four feet between rows. We are thinking about a plot half that large for okra.

We hope to give away about 4000+ pounds of food next year.

I have the results of my test. BL = 40%, KW =80%, GN =60%, Pinto = 80%

I will plant the BL and KW accordingly next year. The other two were just for my edification.

Johnny