Hi Sarah, Welcome to the forum.

Whether it was too early or not to sow bush bean seeds would depend on how wet your soil was (in very wet soil combined with cool temperatures the seed can rot before it sprouts) and how warm your soil temperatures are.

There are different ways to determine when to plant:

1) You can go by the calendar and plant during the OSU-recommended time frames. For beans, OSU recommends planting between April 10-30 for green beans and pole beans (both bush and pole). For lima beans their recommended time frame is slightly different at April 15-30. The way the time frame works is that the earliest date is for southeastern OK, which tends to warm up earliest most years, and the latest date is for northwestern OK which tends to warm up latest (days get warm but nights stay cold later there). Everyone in between the two far corners of the state just chooses a date someone in between those two dates. So, by OSU-recommended dates, you planted slightly early but that does not necessarily mean your beans won't sprout.

2) You can plant using a combination of air temperatures, soil temperatures and your 7-10 day forecast. For the seeds, the most important factor is the soil temperature. The speed at which seeds germinate is determined primarily by how warm or cold the soil is, as long as there is adequate moisture in the soil. Beans sprout slowly in soil temperatures below the upper 50s. If your soil temperature is 59 degrees when you sow bean seeds, eventually most of them (around 97% per Tom Clothier's research) will sprout but it could take a little over two weeks. If your soil temperature is 68 degrees, 90% of the bean seeds will germinate within 11 days, and if you wait until your soil temperature is 77 degrees, you'll get 97% of your bean seeds germinated and growing within a mere 8 days.

I wait for my soil temperatures to reach the right range, then I check to make sure the air temperatures are staying reasonably warm both day and night, and then I look at the 7-day or 10-day forecast to make sure no freezing weather is in it. If everything looks good, then I go ahead and sow the seeds.

So, why don't we all just wait for the soil temperatures to hit 77 degrees since our beans would sprout quickly? Because we live in Oklahoma, where the weather can fluctuate wildly from hot to cold and back again, and where hot air temperatures can arrive to stay way too early some years. Because high air temperatures can cause bean blossoms to drop off the plants without even forming beans, we try to plant beans as early as we reasonably can in order to ensure the plants will blossom and set beans before the weather gets too hot. There's nothing worse than having the high temperatures hitting the 90s to stay at just about the same time your beans are starting to bloom.

I generally sow bean seeds in my raised beds as early as I reasonably can, but not while soil temperatures are still in the 50s. I check my own soil temperatures in my own raised beds with a soil thermometer, generally at about a 2" depth for bean seeds, and plant when my soil temperatures are staying reliably at and above 60 degrees, generally for 3 to 5 days in a row. I am in southcentral OK, so both soil temperatures and air temperatures tend to get warm here pretty early most years. Please note that since I have heavy red clay that drains slowly and holds moisture forever in wet years, I grow beans in a raised bed that's been heavily amended to drain well. Using a raised bed is a win-win situation in spring as the soil warms up more quickly and also drains well so that excessive rainfall is less of an issue.

3. Find a local gardener near you and ask them when they normally sow their bean seeds. That is a great way to learn what works in your specific neighborhood.

I have a friend here who is in his 90s and has farmed and ranched here for virtually his entire life and he tends to plant his beans by the calendar, around the third week in March (our average last frost date is March 28th). Once his beans are in the ground, he really pushes me to hurry up and get mine planted. Having noticed he often loses his first planting to late frosts, I tend to plant 1 to 3 weeks later than him most years, but not because I am watching a calendar---because I am checking my soil temperatures.

This year our soil temperatures were in the 60s very early and I waited a bit longer for our air temperatures to stabilize. I think I planted 2 or 3 weeks ago, and we have had high temps in the upper 80s several times since then, which has made my beans sprout and grow like mad. For most of the previous week my average soil temperature at planting depth has been 68-70 degrees, so I am getting ready to soon sow lima bean seeds.

I didn't even ask my friend if he has planted his bean and corn seed yet (though I bet he has) but I know he put his tomato plants in the ground a little over a week before I put my first tomato plants in the ground, which was just last week.

His property is at a slightly higher elevation than ours, so he can plant at least a week before I can, so I really watched his planting dates carefully early in our years here and learned to wait 1-2 weeks after he planted before I could plant. After a while, I began checking my soil temperatures and have found that to be even more reliable than planting a certain number of weeks after he does.

If I didn't have raised beds, I wouldn't have beans or corn in the ground yet as our ground is horribly wet (and it is raining again today because, you know, we needed more mud and bigger puddles) and seed planted in wet clay at grade level would rot.

So, without knowing how warm or cold your soil is or how moist it is (or isn't), none of us can say whether you planted too early or not. Time will tell. If your bean seeds do not begin sprouting within two weeks of the time you planted them, I'd gently dig around in the soil to see if I could find a sprouting bean seed.

If this is your first year to sow bean seeds, do not be surprised if it looks to you like your beans themselves are popping up out of the ground. Sometimes they do that, and sometimes new gardeners (we all were new once!) will keep poking the seeds back into the ground, which is not the right thing to do. If the bean seeds are popping up out of the ground, it means the seeds are sprouting and the growth sometimes pushes them up above the soil surface.

If you have pet cats, watch the young bean sprouts carefully when the cats are around them. I have to cover my bean bed with bird netting suspended over hoops because my cats enjoy eating bean sprouts and will eat every single plant shortly after it sprouts if they get the chance.

Now, for the strawberry plants. In a 2' x 5' space, you'll only have room for a few plants. Strawberry plants put out runners and spread fairly quickly, so don't attempt to put too many plants into too small of a space. If they are too crowded, they will be more disease-prone and also will not produce as well as those they are spaced out a little more.

Finally, if you don't have a soil thermometer (I used to use a kitchen meat thermometer before I finally bought a soil thermometer) and don't want to check the soil temperature daily, you can use the OK Mesonet soil temperature maps to see what soil temperatures are doing in your county. While your specific soil temperature might not be exactly the same as the soil temperature at the mesonet station nearest you, they should be almost the same. I'm going to link the map below that shows the 3-day average soil temperature at a depth of 4" below bare soil. This map updates daily at 8 a.m. You can use it to see how warm soil temperatures are on an averaged basis. The averaged basis is more helpful than the 1-day temperature for planting purposes because on a very hot day the soil temperature might get really warm, but then the next day, it might be significantly cooler.

Hope this helps.

Dawn

Three-Day Soil Ave Temps at 4" Below Bare Soil

Thank you so much! This definitely helps, I wasn't sure how many strawberries for such a small area. I am in central okc so I am afraid it may have been a bit early for the beans. I do have a wonderful cat that has already dug a seed up, it seems to be making progress. It had 3 big roots started on it(at least thats what I think they were). I just replanted it and then covered the bed so she couldn't get in there anymore. So I hope they will eventually come up. Thank you so much for the link, I will definitely use this before I plant my tomatoes and peppers. I was going to put them in this weekend but it's been kinda chilly.

Sarah.

Quite frankly, what you stated is not adequate space to try both strawberries and beans. Choose one or the other and find another place for the other. One or five bush beans won't give you much harvest.