How To Grow Runner Beans

Today, I am going to show you how to grow runner beans. These are some runner bean plants here and you can see the fruit. Runner beans are a popular vegetable to grow and they also have these quite attractive bright red flowers so they are also good to grow in the ornamental garden.

For a good crop of runner beans, preparing the soil is most important, so what you have to do is dig the soil to a spades depth or a forks depth in this case and the soil needs to be quite rich so it's a really good idea to add plenty of well-rotted manure and mix it into the soil, like this. When it comes to planting the runner beans themselves, you can either use seed. Here go some runner bean seeds.

I am now going to show you how to sow runner bean seeds. It's quite important with these that you plant them after the danger of frost has past. So, plant them in the hole like this, cover them up and then within a few weeks, they should pop up out of the ground and your runner bean plant starts to grow.

Runner beans grow quickly and they need support, so as you can see here, I've got some bamboo canes tied up at the top so that the plants have got something to grow up. Once the beans have reached the top of the canes, you need to pinch out the top of the plants to stop from growing any taller. You need to water them plenty and it will soon be time for harvesting in the summer.

You just pick them off like this. These are still a little bit small, so leave those to grow a bit longer and just pick the biggest ones and there you go, home grown runner beans. .