Do you grow french beans in a greenhouse?

[Kristen]

Runners do not do well in polytunnels

Might be that, unlike French Beans, they need some insect pollination, and I suspect Bees etc. find it harder to get into a Polytunnel, or they are not active early enough in the season when the protected crop starts flowering

[marchogaeth]

I've grown runners successfully in the tunnel and at least two of the local gardeners I know do it every year with great success, early crops and plenty of them. Most things benefit from the shelter (certainly round here).

As an aside, I'm always impressed how many insects there are in my tunnel. I have cerinthe as a weed, which lots of things love, and marigolds (both sorts) all of these can be in flower just about all throughout the year. Almost as soon as the broad beans flower in spring, bees appear. I usually have a few herbs running to seed and hover flies love them. My doors are not (obviously) hermetically sealed!

[BertieFox]

I grow both dwarf and climbing French beans in the polytunnel and have done so for ten years. Dwarf beans will give an early quick crop but after the first flush they are soon over. If you keep them totally picked with no old pods, they will reward you with a second or third 'flush' of beans, but picking is very fiddly and back breaking, especially if your beds are wider than one metre.

I sowed a climbing bean, Fortex, the best French variety I have ever found (Graines Baumaux supply but so do other French firms). This has enormously long thin pods as long as runners and never get stringy. Save seed if you grow it as the new seed is horrendously expensive.

I sowed the seed in late April, harvested the first beans in late May or early June, and I am STILL cropping the plants a little now in late October. They grow very tall, so grow them up a wigwam, and pinch out the growing points for branching out lower down or train the growing tips downwards. If you keep them picked with no mature pods developing, they will continue to go to the frosts. I never got round to sowing outside this year, and yet we have had beans every meal for the entire summer thanks to this variety.

Although climbing beans are later, it is worth growing them in a greenhouse or tunnel, but you DO need to keep them well watered.

[arpoet]

Thanks for all the advice on this subject.
Next year I will be growing several DFB's in buckets on a bench in one of my greenhouses. They should then be easy to harvest at waist height.

[Zelenina]

I grew Blue Lake climbing beans in a greenhouse in Lancashire in 1976. In those days climbing French beans were a bit exotic for English gardens, but I saw them in a catalogue and thought I'd give them a try. They did very well

It was an old Victorian greenhouse with half the panes missing, so there was plenty of ventilation, but enough glass left to give some shelter and extra warmth. But I remember it being a hot summer, so maybe they would've done just as well outside.

[Zelenina]

I've grown French beans only a few foot apart quite happily and saved the seeds, as Real Seeds say, they don't cross easily

It's true that French beans are mostly self pollinating, Alison, but in my experience they do sometimes cross.

I had some Hutterite soup beans from the HSL, which are supposed to be dwarf with white flowers and flat pods and distinctive yellowish seeds with dark eyes. And they all grew like that except one, which climbed and had mauve flowers and rounded pods and black seeds. The seed it came from was exactly the same as the others, so there must have been some crossing.

The two pods that I ate from it as green beans tasted delicious, so I'd love to know what it was crossed with. I didn't grow out the seeds from it yet, but hope to do so next year when I'll have more space. Maybe I'll breed some new varieties from it.

Yaaaay!!! I've reached sprouter status