French Beans - Blue Lake

 


All the advice is to pick the pods asap so as to encourage further pod
development. How is this so given that the pods develop from their
flower, so
therefore more flowers would have to develop in order for
more pods.

Does early cropping encourage further flower growth, or does the plant
flower
only once?




--
anthony123hopki

 



Harvesting the green beans (French beans) while they are still green
encourages the plant to set more flowers. Let the beans mature to brown
and dry, and the plant will cease producing.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/2/maude
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/28/naomi_klein_the_real_crime_scene

 

anthony123hopki wrote:

This is what happens in fact.  In addition the beans are nicer when young so
pick them regularly and if you can't eat them all while fresh then give the
rest away, you will get more good beans yourself.


Different cultivars have different flowering patterns.  The ones favoured by
commercial growers flower over a short period and most of the beans are
ready together.  This is advantageous as such growers like to harvest all at
once, often using machinery.

Home growers are better off with a cultivar that flowers continuously over a
long period so there is a steady harvest of beans.  It is a while since I
grew them but I think blue lake are in the latter category.  The cultivar
that I grew last summer produced continuously for seven months.


David

 




    Which is, in fact, the case for the "Blue Lake" round green beans.
I suppose they could be called "French" beans because they're round
green "zydeco" or snap-beans but I sure don't think of them as being in
the same league as "real" French fillet beans; "Delinel", say.
    Blue Lake beans were developed for machine-processing by West
Coast (U.S.A.) food packers. They blossom and bear within a narrow time
frame in order to provide uniform, if mediocre, beans for the canning
industry. Blue Lake beans develop a thick, fleshy pod quickly but it
gets tough as the beans mature. Blue Lake beans endure close spacing and
high temperatures (back in the day, we picked'em for Del Monte in South
Florida in late fall, nearly winter) and are tough enough for machine
picking (going to be steam pressure canned, remember). Unfortunately,
Blue Lake beans are among those primitive hairy beans with mediocre,
generic "green" flavor; pods get tough long before they mature, and they
have far too short a harvest for home gardens.
    Traditionally, round beans for the fresh foods markets were hand
picked and different varieties could be found in stores here in the
States. However, within the past ten-or-so years, machine-picked Blue
Lake beans have come to dominate fresh produce departments in
supermarkets in U.S.A. and the better-quality richer-flavored more
tender "snap beans" have disappeared from all but farmers' markets,
specialty markets, and home gardens and seeds for some of those have
become hard to find.

 

Balvenieman wrote:

It's more than 20 years since I grew blue lakes so I had to look it up.  It
is odd because now there seems to be climbing and bush varieties, some
photos look quite round and others flatish.  Many suppliers and comentators
say they bear over a period of time.  This mob:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1216/is_n4_v196/ai_18285074/

say the original 'blue lake' has been bred quite a bit more since it was
first seen.

It seems that there is more than one bean going around called by that name
so it may depend on which one Anthony has whether it flowers all at once or
over a period of time.

David