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How Many Beans Per Square Foot?

October 3, 2011 By RDG

Basket of painted pony beans.
These painted pony beans were grown in two square feet.

Do you know how many beans to expect to harvest from one square foot of a square foot garden? I didn’t, so I grew some this year to find out.

I decided to plant painted pony beans because I enjoy making bean soup using dry beans. I selected them from the seed savers exchange catalog because they were described as making a good dry bean.

Painted pony beans are a bush variety as opposed to a pole bean. I followed the recommended spacing in Mel Bartholomew’s book of nine bush beans per square foot.

Harvest Time

I harvested the beans yesterday after they dried out in the garden. I was happy to see that they filled my basket nicely.

Bowl full of painted pony beans.
These beautiful painted pony beans weighed 12.75 ounces

I shelled the beans and then weighed them. They weighed 12.75 ounces or about 3/4 of a pound. Most of the recipes I have for bean soup call for either 1 pound or a half a pound.

I could make a recipe that calls for a half a pound of dry beans and save the rest for planting next year. Next year I can plant three square feet and hopefully harvest 18 ounces. That would give me 1 pound of dry beans plus some to save for planting.

Conclusion

I obtained a yield of 6 ounces per square foot of the bush variety of painted pony beans. I will use this as a baseline for planning purposes for next year’s garden.

Related Pages

  • Painted Pony Bean Soup Recipe
  • 2012 Dry Bean Harvest
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Filed Under: Gardening Tagged With: beans, gardening, painted pony, square foot garden

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