Jerry Got His Pea Beans Planted Friday Afternoon

Friday evening about 7PM I finished planting my pea beans. Pea beans is a phrase we use for second crop beans after peas. You can see the seed bed is less than ideal. After Birdseye Foods harvested the peas, I disked the field getting ready to plant beans. There are a lot of clods because it was wet when they harvested the peas. It was helpful having row cleaners on the planter to move some of the clods and pea residue away from the row.

When you plant in cloddy conditions like this, you hope for a rain. Last year I planted pea beans on July 11 and there was an 80 percent chance of rain that night. It did not rain for two weeks! The beans that did germinate right away grew up to my knees. The ones that were in clods and did not germinate until it rained two weeks later were only half as tall. The weather really cooperated the rest of the season with a very late frost. Early in November I harvested 28.5 bushels an acre! I got lucky this year because it rained 1.75 inches Saturday night. So, I am hoping to get lucky the rest of the season too!