Growing Green Beans Inside, for a Winter Harvest

It was January 22 in zone 5b, which means the weather outside sucked. The last frost date for this year was many, many weeks away. There are times in winter when you just realize how very long the season is and not everyone can afford to run off to a sunny destination to get away from it all. So what's a girl to do? Start gardening of course.

To be honest we are still finishing off the green beans in the freezer from last summer but the idea of growing fresh ones in our basement seemed too tempting to pass up. A quick google search implied that this task was indeed possible so I got down to business.

I decided on an egg carton as my seedling tray just to get them started. Though the beans are quite large they do not require soaking to get them ready for planting. I topped up my trays with a few handfuls of moist seed starting soil and then placed the tray about 3 inches under a grow light. I covered the egg carton with an upside down container to act like a humidity dome. As long as the humidity dome covers the seedlings there is not much need to water but if things started to look dry I gave the soil a spritz with a water filled spray bottle.

One week later we had these cute little sprouts.

Once their little heads were safely above the soil I removed the humidity dome container and watered them daily to make sure they didn't dry out.

After a couple more days the seedlings started to straighten out and grow true leaves. In case you are new to this, the first set of leaves grown after germination are called seed leaves and they almost all look the same regardless of what you are growing. The next set of leaves that grow are the true leaves and will look a lot more like the leaves the plant is supposed to have. Don't bother to remove the seed leaves though. They will dry up and fall off by themselves in good time.

When the seedlings were almost 2 weeks old and were almost all standing up straight I moved them to some larger pots. If my intention had been to grow seedlings for my outdoor garden I would have moved them into some nice small pots but I want these guys to produce beans in my basement so I want to move them as little as possible while they grew. I cleaned out some pots I had left over from last year but really any container with holes drilled into the bottom for drainage would have worked.

As you can see from this photo, bush beans grow quickly. Luckily my shelves on this unit are adjustable because it wouldn't be long before these guys would need more space.

Bush beans are a quick growing, self pollinating plant. That means they aren't reliant on pollinators like bees to turn their flowers into harvestable veggies.

Before these seedlings were four weeks old they were showing the beginnings of flowers that will later become beans. As you can see they started to grow up through the shelf above even after I moved them all to the bottom shelf and raised the next shelf up to give them more space.

That brings us to today! As these plants grow I will update this page so keep checking in.