Getting pole beans to climb

[Klfortunato]

Hi everyone! I need a bit of advice. My pole beans this year are not sending out any grabbers to climb onto the trellis we built for it. Each plant is not about 6 inches to a foot tall. They are flowering and producing, but not climbing at all. Every time I water them or it rains, they fall over. I checked the seed package and they are not the bushing variety. Any ideas? A picture is attached at the following link. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6PaH ... VdZMnFzbEk

[gumbo2176]

Same thing happens to my pole beans. I plant them by my trellis and they at first tend to just hang pretty close to the ground, but once they send out tendrils, they take off and climb like rabid monkeys. I'd not be too concerned just yet as they are still pretty small.

[pepperhead212]

The strange thing that I hear in this is that the beans are flowering at this size. How long ago did you plant them? My pole beans normally don't flower until all the way to the top of the five ft. trellis, and well beyond. I just got my first beans after about two months, which is about normal, but I have been pinching off the ends of those vines that are way past the top, and they have branched out below.

[UrbanFarmerJon]

I had the same issue this year with my pole beans, they stayed around a foot tall forever. Then they took off and are now at the top of my 6ft trellis and hanging over by about another foot or two. I haven't any flowers yet, but I see tons of little buds that will be flowering shortly!

It could be that your package was mis-labeled at the factory.

These were mine from about a week ago, they were planted by seed around the end of May.

Polebeans

[Gary350]

Sometimes the factory makes mistakes. You probably have bush beans marked pole beans. One year my bush beans turned out to be all pole beans it was too much work to cut poles so I mowed all the beans down with the lawn mower then planted bush beans.

[imafan26]

If the beans show up more or less all at one time, then it probably is a bush bean. I did grow pole beans earlier this year in January. I got beans for about a month and then it sort of stopped. A couple of months later the bottom of the bean started growing and producing beans but the second growths did not climb either.

[jal_ut]

"It could be that your package was mis-labeled at the factory."

I am leaning towards this.

[Taiji]

Me too! Last year I planted what were labeled as burpless cukes supposed to grow 10 to 12 inches but even the tiny prototypes under the female flower were short and fat. ( and so were the finished products)

Very dissappointing, but this year's cukes are what they are supposed to be. Mistakes do happen. Never told Burpee's about it, they probably would have sent a complimentary package of something!

[Gary350]

I planted Blue Lake Bush beans this year and about 30% are trying to climb. There must be some pole beans mixed in with the bush beans. I am not going to worry about it, let them climb all they want I am not putting up poles. Pole beans will not climb things that are slippery like bamboo poles.

[MichaelC]

Did you buy them as starts?

I was sold a six pack of Blue Lake pole bean starts this year that turned out to be very short-lived bush beans. I pulled them a month ago, it was tremendously disappointing. I had built a new, robust trellis for them which was supposed to shade my southwestern window! At his time last year, I was harvesting pounds a week.

I've planted some Blue Lake pole bean seeds since and have about ten plants up, a few of them already vining. I'm hoping by the end of the summer I'll have some beans again.