Why I Support my Bush Snap Beans

We used to only grow pole beans. Then we met Japanese beetles and they loved our pole beans. So we decided to try growing bush beans. They loved them less. We grew both types for several years, but there are tradeoffs to each.

With pole beans, it’s easier to harvest but acts as a trap crop for Japanese beetles. With bush beans, they largely ignore them but it’s back-bending work to gather the large flushes of snap beans.

The lower pest pressure won us over, and I now try to string my bush beans up annually to help them stay off the ground, which mitigates slug and other soil living pest pressure too. It also, cleverly, makes them much easier to see and harvest — a time saver.

We use small scrap cedar boards that are sometimes used to stake peppers and such. We place screws at 8” and 16” high and run twine, using the screw to fasten the string to so it won’t sag or slip down.

I am careful to lift the plants from underneath to support all of the vegetation as I’m doing this. Because bush beans top out around 24”, I find just 2 loops of twine at 8 and 16 inches is plenty of support to make bush beans a much more enjoyable crop to harvest.

A bonus is that it opens up the space between the rows (if you’ve given them 18” between rows) for the interplanted leafy greens or radish to have plenty of room to mature, too.

Hope this helps some of you manage space and ease of harvesting this summer!