i just bought a hundred lbs of organic black beans from a local farmer today, and asked him how much space would be required to grow 50 lbs of black beans. he did some number crunching, and told me you would need 1220 ft of growing space. you can take it from there.

keith

Thank you for the guideline and for taking time out of your schedule to reply to my thread. Unfortunately since I do container gardening, I need to know how many plants are equal to 1220 feet of growing space. Basically how many plants could you grow in 1220 feet of growing space. Also I don't need something as much as 50 lbs. of beans; probably half of that amount in weight would suffice.

Could the guideline you were given be used as a guideline for all beans that are going to be used dry?

As I stated before you don't use row spacing with container gardening only plant spacing. I thank you for the advice and recommendation given, but unfortunately when you say 'this is how much plant in feet' it makes absolutely no sense for container gardening; it's clear-as-mud.

What are the dimensions of your containers? Someone should be able to tell you how many beans you can plant in each one. I planted a little bush bean 'Comtesse de Chambord' 4 beans to each 12 inch hanging basket last year and they did quite well. I think it will depend on which bean you are growing and whether they are a bush or a pole type as to how many you can get away with planting in each container.

Annette

IMHO the only way to get any reasonable quantities of dry beans using containers is to go vertical by planting pole-type dry bean varieties such as "Rattlesnake", "Hidatsa", "Good Mother Stallard", etc. or maybe half-runners such as "State", "Aztec" would work as well.

As rxkeith alluded to, one needs a lot of space to crop any appreciable amount of bush dry beans, even for home use. I feel that bush dry beans are something that does not "translate" well to the container gardening of the average household, unless one just wants a couple of meals here and there. If small amounts are good enough then I recommend the more prolific varieties like "Pinto", "Great Northern", etc.

I grow and harvest around 100 pounds of food-grade bush dry beans yearly for family and friends. In my opinion the amount of space needed for even twenty pounds of bush dry beans simply does not make container gardening a realistic option. A family of four could easily consume twenty pounds of dry beans in one winter.

I would be interested to know in the future what you do and how well it works out for you.

Regards,
-Tom

If you want some specifics, 25ft. rows of each of the following produced approximately:

Peregion : 3 lbs.
Pinto : 3.25 lbs.
Soldier : 2 lbs.
French Horticultural : 2.5 lbs.
Pale Red Kidney : 3 lbs.
Arikara Yellow : 2.5 lbs.
Calypso Black : 1.5 lbs.
Great Northern : 2.75 lbs.
Navy Pea : 1.5 lbs.
Small Red : 2.25 lbs.
Vermont Cranberry : 1.25 lbs.
Pink Floyd : 2 lbs.
Scarlet Beauty : 2.25 lbs.
Jacob's Cattle : 1.75 lbs.
Henderson Baby Lima : 2 lbs. (approx. half the crop did not mature before hard frost killed the plants)

I have a bunch more but they are all in the same yield range - I think one can get the point with the information provided.

I had a decent but average growing season last year. I was satisfied with the crop but I usually get somewhat better yields than this. I wing it with the plant spacing but shoot for around 4-5 inches in the row. Extrapolate what you will from the information provided.

Hope you find this helpful.
-Tom

if you are container growing, i would second the suggestion of going vertical with pole beans that are good for dry use to maximize yield. still, i don't know how you are going to get 20 lbs of dry seed. supports don't have to be fancy, just tall enough and sturdy enough to stay upright. pole bean seeds would be spaced 6 inches apart. i'm also interested in how you plan to proceed.

keith

To me growing "dry Beans" in a container is a waste of time money space and effort. There is no conceivable way to get enough yield to make it worth doing. It would be much cheaper to just go to the store and buy a bag of beans. There are lots of things that can be grown in pots. One could even grow pole snap beans in pots but almost anything will have more value and yield than growing "dry beans" in pots.

Sorry but thats the way I see it.

Actually, I've often grown dry beans, though I can't grow enough for my family in my yard. We eat a lot of beans, and our hands down favorite is True Red Cranberry -- not available at the grocery store. You can special order it for boocoo bucks plus boocoo shipping. Or, I can grow it, and add it in with other beans in various recipes.

I've grown them in the ground in the past. This year I'm going to add a couple of BIG containers. I just want more. And my kids can see how things grow, where the food comes from. I'm not a farmer. I'm a gardener. Anything I can successfully grow here at home is better than from the supermarket.

I grew dry beans t his year. we had terrible weather. i'm still however harvesting dry beans. i read on an LDS page, plan 15 plants per person in the house. however, they are likely not planning for vegetarians. I grew the beans from the dried beans you get in bulk at the store. they all sprouted and did very very well. they dont require very much space, but it was 51 degrees at night all summer. very very odd. however they did better than anything else. its a fantastic idea. dont give up. and remember it takes several hours to cook them, so in an emergency it could take all your propane to cook them. we can them, so all we do is pour them out of a jar on some rice and heat them. easy. fast.

Thank you for this info. 15 plants per person is a very good answer to what I think most were contemplating in reapects to growing. I've recently gone off grid in west Texas near the big bend national park and your answer helped tremendously. Thank you.

I know I'm a little late to the game for this question, being that it was posted in 2011 and its now 2017... That said, in my experience panting in both raised beds and a 60'x120' garden... Bush beans spaced at 3" apart in rows 12-18" apart are good for canning. If I were planting in a 4'x8' raised bed you would get 3 8' rows with a little crowding and a plant total of 96 plants 32 plants per row. I agree with most of the above gardeners on the inefficiency of trying to raise enough dry beans in a raised bed. I grow Vermont cranberries in 80' rows that yield apprx. 4-5# per row. Pole beans is another good idea in a situation where you are using raised beds; where I use 5 10' tree branches to make a tee-pee and plant 4 plants per pole with a total of 20 plants per 4 cubic foot. Not sure what the total yield is on these beans are as I do not dry them (planting Kentucky Wonder). But I can say that if you have a 4'x8' raised bed with 40 plants is plenty for fresh consumption of a family of 4. If you want more to preserve, you will need to plant more. All that being said... I'm not sure that there is any feasible way to grow beans of any sort in anything smaller than a raised bed. Large containers may be good for dwarf fruit trees and even some cucumbers or patio-style corn, but enough beans to produce any real yield is gonna require some space. All that being said always remember to compost the bean plants after they die off. Lots of good nitrogen in them.

Best of Luck,

Danny

Well the internet remembers forever, so additional contributions always have a place. :)

From experiments in my small, half-paved backyard an 18"x18" pot with 4-5 plants in it makes enough peas, green beans, or dry beans for me to have 2-8 meals off of, depending on if they're a side or a "whole mess." I often forget to fertilize the containers as much as I should so that could probably be upped a bit, but it's never going to be as productive as the ground. Also can't grow varieties that get much over 4' or else tipping over starts to become a problem, so that cuts into the production per plant as well.

My experience with growing dry bush bean types in large plots of over 3,000 square feet has shown me that a 20 ft row seeded at about 7 inches apart seems to yield about 4 pounds of beans. So I would say a 100 feet of row should give you about 20 to 25 pounds of dry beans depending on the variety.

I grow Italian Horticultural Beans for drying, also known as Borlotti, also known as cranberry beans, also known as October beans. (grin) They look like this:

This was an unusually productive year, I had 3 rows, 60 feet each. My final harvest before drying yielded 79.5 pounds. I normally get about 20 pounds from each 60 foot row. I grow directly in the garden and not in containers, and my garden is well amended with manure supplied regularly and prolifically by my beef cattle, so my soil is fertile and productive and that also makes a difference. I don't plant 7 inches apart, though, I plant about 3 inches apart and these do well with that spacing. Given the spacing difference, I'd say bluejay and I have approximately the same final yield.

Now I just have to find an easier way to shell the darned things, my thumbs will never be the same!

Annie

Never done it myself but know someone who puts the pods when perfect dry in a sack, stomps on them or smacks them up against something solid, then pours them out on a sheet and picks the dried beans out.

Annette

As far as shelling large amounts of beans. If you smack your pillow case full of dry pods against something solid or evern work the sack full of beans pods with a smooth stick like a piece of broom stick you will have an amount of cracked an broken seed. I would suggest putting your very dry crisp pods in a pillow case or sack of some sort and nead the sack of pods throughly cracking them open and liberating the beans from their pods. Then you can take the contents of your sack and pour them with broken pods material back and forth from one contianer to another in front of a fan. This will blow away the lighter pod material and the beans will drop into your container. After a number of times doing this procedure you will have lots of cleaned beans. This method is fairly fast and you won't have cracked seed if you want to save some for planting your next crop.

Thanks, Annette and Bluejay. I do save the seeds for next year's planting, so wouldn't want to break them up.

Annie

I shy away from resurrecting old threads, but this is the best discussion I've found anywhere on this. So here I go.

So I'm a weirdo and do beans in a system of semi-raised beds, two being 3'x18' on either side of a center one being a large mound that's 5'x18'. My strategy has been to plant pole beans in the middle of the rows, and bush beans densely around the sides. The mound has pole beans in the middle and then a lot of space for a jungle of bush beans on the slopes.

I felt like I was doing pretty good until I read the above. Those yields are great!

Mine aren't quite as high, but after everything else is added in I'm looking at probably 27 lbs of dry beans from around 200sqft of space. I grow Ireland Creek Annie and Rockwell bush beans, and Annie Jackson and Scarlet Runner pole beans.

That garden is nicknamed "Jupiter". Hoping to construct "Saturn" in coming years and add a few more varieties.

Wealth is burying your hands into a massive bowl of dry beans. :)

Phil

Whidbey Island WA

I know for pinto beans you would need an 8”inch container and you would need 1836 containers.

That’s for 50pounds of pinto beans

If you had room for that many pots - and could buy that much soil - you would probably have a yard big enough to build raised beds, which would have better production.