Sunday, August 14, 2011

Bumper Benton Beans


We have frozen 2 bu of Benton green beans off 3 rows 30 feet long. That's .004 of an acre. When the green beans are good the soybeans are good and some of them are right beside the garden.

Thanks Brian in East Oregon for the seed. Brian is a vegetable seed producer and we have done some seed exchanges over the years. We hit the jackpot on this exchange.

All I did was make rows in the tilled soil with my garden planter and dropped the seed in thick and cover it with my work shoes. Of course I inoculated them with garden inoculant and they really took off and nodulated well. I spread a big of triple 12 across the 30 by 40 garden and it's had plenty of woodstove ash.

It got cultivated twice with my friend Steve's big wheel push cultivator and kept the weeds at bay. I never used any insecticide but should have used a little Sevin as there was some bean leaf beetle bites on a few pods.

LuAnn understands the correlation of the green bean harvest to our soybean harvest so she is already spending the money in her head. Another trip this winter wouldn't be too bad!

Wayne Murphy's little Cockshutt 20 would make a nice classic garden tractor.

Ed

3 comments:

  1. One of my favourite brands of old tractor ED. I've got a 40 and a 50. Beans are good in my garden too. No chemicals or fertilizer though. I'm not organic farming but will avoid chemicals, insecticides etc. whenever possible. I even picked my potato bugs by hand and avoided using any dust so far.

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  2. I've seen a few at shows, but Cockshutt's were never big around here.

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  3. We are the same way Ralph, normally use nothing but a little fertilizer and probably not enough of it. This garden could use a good dose of rotten cow manure, organic matter and P a little on the low side but it has produced a huge amount of food in a few years.

    I have owned several 30's to 50 Cockshutts or the E series Co-Op's that made it across the border. There were a few here but no big dealer that really made them popular.

    There were more Oliver's here with 3 dealers within 30 miles but of course Farmall and Deere sold a lot more than either one of them.

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