Quick Facts: Beans are one of the easiest plants to grow in a kitchen garden. I plant mine in spring and again in fall, and depending on whether I choose pole or bush varieties, I can be picking beans within 60 to 90 days.

Beans Are One of the Most Practical Plants to Grow in a Kitchen Garden

From pinto beans to chickpeas, green beans to edamame, beans are one of the most practical things you can grow in a kitchen garden. They germinate in under a week, need very little fuss once established, and depending on the variety, you can be harvesting your own within 60 to 90 days.

The average person in the United States eats about seven and a half pounds of beans a year. Once you've grown your own, you'll understand why. Let's get into what makes beans so easy to grow, plus a few things you probably didn't know about them.

(Prefer to listen? Check out Episode 24 of the Grow Your Self podcast, "If You Don't Know Beans About Beans," on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio here.)

First, Are Beans a Fruit?

You wouldn't put them in a fruit salad, but botanically speaking, yes: beans are a fruit.

• Why: Like peas, beans form from flowers and grow as seed pods.
• What that means: They're technically fruit, even though we treat them like vegetables in the kitchen.
• Why it matters for growing: Knowing beans are a fruit helps you understand the conditions they need to thrive in your garden (more on that below).

Why You Should Try Growing Your Own Beans

• You skip the processing markup. When you buy canned beans, you're mostly paying for the can and the processing, not the food itself. Farmers have to dry the beans in the field, thresh them from their pods, then boil and cook them before they're canned.
• Dried beans stretch further than canned. If you're budget-conscious, buy dried beans in bulk instead of canned. Rehydrated, they'll give you six to eight times as much as a can for a fraction of the cost.
• You get access to varieties you'll never find in a store. Grocery stores only stock bush beans, which produce all at once. Pole beans produce continuously in smaller batches, which isn't practical for commercial farming, but often means better flavor for home gardeners.
• Not ready to grow your own yet? A farmers' market is a great next step — you'll get more variety than the grocery store and support local growers at the same time.

Beans Growing Season

Most beans love the warm and cool seasons (typically your spring and fall). Frost will frequently kill any bean plants remaining in your garden. I tried growing beans during the hot season in Houston when I lived there, and found that the plants would stay green if I kept them watered but would stop flowering and fruiting. The beans I did get were really tough (not in a good way).

The one type of beans I did grow really well in the hot Houston summers was edamame. My kids had a lot of fun watching it grow, and we love some steamed homegrown edamame with coarse salt on the shells.

How to Plant Beans in Your Kitchen Garden

One of the easiest things about planting beans is the size of the seed—nice and big and easy to handle. You can see what you're doing, whether you've already sown a seed in a hole or not. Beans also tend to germinate very quickly, sometimes in under a week.

Before planting dry bean seeds, soak them in water overnight to soften their protective seed coat and ease sprouting.

In addition to preparing your beans, it's also a good idea to prepare your soil. Add some extra compost and some mycorrhizae, which will help speed up germination and aid your bush beans in pulling nutrients from the soil to grow faster and bigger. 

Plant your beans about one inch deep in your garden. I like to dig a little trough with my shovel in a straight line. This helps me see the spacing between each seed. Place your seeds about four to six inches apart, or about one seed every hand length. Cover with loose soil.

If you're growing pole beans, you'll need to plant your beans next to a trellis or another tall structure that your beans can climb up with their tiny tendrils. Pole beans can grow from six to eight feet tall and will continue to produce until frost arrives.

How to Support Beans as They Grow

Bush beans don't technically need a trellis, but I still support them to prevent them from flopping over from the weight of the beans onto the soil and forming a nice little bridge for pests. The way you can support them is by hilling them, or pushing a bit of compost around the base of the plant to form a mound. If a plant seems really heavy, you can use a stake and some twine to hold the plant upright.

Another option to support bush beans is by forming what's called a Florida weave by putting two stakes on either end of your row of beans and running twine back and forth between the stakes (hold the twine in place by adding screws along the stakes).

I personally prefer the taste and the look of pole beans. I grow my pole beans up the sides of my trellises when it's too cool out for tomatoes. I think the purple pole beans I grew up the arch trellises one year were even prettier than my vining tomatoes.

How to Tend Beans as They Grow

With both pole and bush beans, the most important tending task to keep the plants growing and producing is regular watering. Keeping the plants watered is especially important in the first three to four weeks after planting. You never want to let the soil completely dry out before the seeds have germinated.

Once the first tendrils of pole beans have found a structure to climb onto, the plants will require less maintenance, but still need at least an inch of water per week. If you're not getting that amount of rain, make sure you hand water or install some type of irrigation system.

How Long Does It Take Beans to Grow?

Beans that you're harvesting fresh, like edamame, will typically be ready in a 60-day cycle or so. Dried beans, like black beans require closer to 80 or 90 days so that they can fully dry. During this time, you can basically leave them be in your garden. They'll turn brown, and you'll eventually be able to rattle them when they're ready for harvest.

Beans Benefits: Edamame vs. Black Beans

Let's do a little food fight between edamame and black beans. Here's how they stack up per 100 grams:

• Calories: Edamame, 121. Black beans, 91
• Fiber: Edamame, 5g. Black beans, 7g
• Sugar: Edamame, 2g. Black beans, 0.2g
• Protein: Edamame, 11g. Black beans, 6g
• Calcium: Edamame, 63mg. Black beans, 35mg
• Iron: Edamame, 2mg. Black beans, 2mg (tie)
• Potassium: Edamame, 436mg. Black beans, 300mg

The Winner

Black beans win on fiber and stay lower in sugar.

Edamame takes the lead on protein, calcium, and potassium. Iron's a tie.

As far as growing these two, they're similar to grow, but edamame will spend less time in the garden because it's not a dried bean. I think edamame is super fun to grow with kids. Black beans can be cool too—you just have to let them hang out in your garden longer. It’s a little bit more of a waiting game. 

That's How Beans Grow!

If you're looking for something that's simple, that's grows very quickly, and that adds a lot of foliage and color to your garden, you can't go wrong with beans. There's no beans about it, you should definitely grow beans in your kitchen garden.

Want to hear more about how beans became a staple in diets around the world? Listen to my "You Don't Know Beans About Beans" podcast episode on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio here, or Stitcher.