Beans Sprouting Again in Southern Minnesota

This is another sign of how nice and warm it has been this fall. Last Saturday my brother Joe was chopping and disk-ripping my corn stalks. He burns wood so I told him to bring his chain saw and trailer along. There were some big trees growing along a drainage ditch that I have wanted to get cut down for years. With the field work done we headed over to cut the trees. Making wood is much easier when you have a tractor and loader. We would cut a tree down and pull it into the field to cut up. Working in the harvested bean field I noticed these beans growing.

These are beans that dropped onto the ground when I was combining. We call this harvest loss. You do everything you can to minimize harvest loss but you can never get to zero. Because there was rain after I combined the beans and it has been very warm, these beans that were lost during harvest germinated. I have seen this occur one other time a number of years ago, but it is unusual. That year you could drive down the road and see how many beans you or your neighbors lost during harvest. Some of those bean fields really got green before there was a killing frost!