I built a new bed this year and started some beans, tomatoes, and zucchini from seed. The beans were in blast off mode in the starter pots before I planted them, literally climbing my windows. The day I planted them in the bed, however, they started struggling and don’t seem to be recovering. I am at a loss what is going on here and hoping one of you kind folks can help me. Photographed is one of the leaves that seemes to just be curling up and dying. Please help!
So a couple things.
First, beans in start pots seems like a bad start to me. Not that I haven't also made this mistake, but beans (and peas, really any determinate annual) in my experience tend to struggle with transplanting. They do far better with direct seed, and even more ideally, with seed that has acclimatized to your growing conditions over a couple seasons. Starting them in trays or pots; you disturb the roots, the mixture will have a reduced flora/ fauna, then you stress them by moving them from a super comfy climate to a more stressful one. Beans tend to have plenty of storage tissue in their cotyledons to survive whatever they need to survive to establish.
Second, even though plenty of beans are indeterminate, most beans are determinate and evolved to be determinate. They die as part of their typical lifecycle in as far as they aren't usually continuously productive. It might be you are simply towards the end of the season on these? Have you gotten beans yet?
Third, I saw the other comment on inoculation, but really, rhizobium is ubiquitous in soils. Yes, there are plenty studies saying you'll get better results if you inoculate, but its by no means necessary to get great results. Just being in the soil is plenty of exposure to rhizobium if you've got healthy, mature soil. So, that begs the question: What kind of soil are you planting into? Is this yard soil? Yard soil mixed with potting mix? All potting mix? If so, how mature? How many seasons have you grown in it? If you have immature soil, and your beans are struggling, a surprising fix can be to apply a nitrogen fertilizer. This gives the beans more runway and more time to culture their own rhizobium colonies. When you harvest, don't pull the bean roots out. Cut the stems low and let them rot in place, and there will be plenty of rhizobium around in the future.
Fourth, beans are also subject to quite a bit of disease issues. They'll get rust and blight, and viruses. All kinds of shit. But also other issues can look like disease but its actually a management issue. You can often identify whats wrong by just looking at the pattern of damage being caused.
So lets look at your damage and think about how its happening.
You've got marginal (at the leaf edge) chorlosis (its not green any more) extending towards the leaf veins. The plant is trying to scavenge resources from the old leafs and is moving those nutrients to new leaves.
This is very typical in plants that are experiencing some kind of deficiency (like potassium). BUT...
It could also be a watering issue. If you have a soil pan that has formed (this can happen if you don't mix yard soil and potting mix sufficiently, it will develop a clay layer), the plant roots may have become stunted. This would also be consistent with having transplanted them (did they become root bound?).
So treatment..
Do you have any wood ash? If so, spread that around. Its rich in potassium and just, in general, plants love it. It wont hurt anything and if thats the issue, they should perk right up.
Also...
Whats your watering schedule? Are you watering every day? It could be that even if you are, your roots are bound to the top few centimeters of soil, and just don't have access to deeper water. Dig down into your soil careful and see if the soil has stratified. If this is a new bed where the soil hasn't been tilled very much by insects, this would be the first thing I would look for. Direct seeding in the future would mitigate for this. In the mean time, either top dress with more soil or water more often.
Thank you for the detailed response. I will keep in mind your first point for next year definitely. it was evident to me that the beans started and grew way faster than anything else I was planting so it sounds like it would make sense to plant them directly in the bed next time. Good tip.
It is the beginning of the season where I am. I only just put them in the ground ~10 days ago. The growing season has just begun. So no beans and they (hopefully) have not reached the end of their life cycle.
As I said in another post this is a newly built bed for this year, so the soil isn’t what I would call “mature” although from a gardening standpoint I am not sure what that means. I did not (foolishly?) combine the fresh raised bed mix soil with my existing, i just put it on top. Succeed or fail, I will leave the roots in the ground at the the season.
I do have plenty of wood ash. I have a wood burning stove and a bucket full of ash that I can easily add. How much do you recommend?
My watering schedule so far has been “whatever nature is doing”. For much of the week and a half or so that they have been in the ground it has been rainy and overcast. Only the last 2 or 3 days has it been sunny.
I appreciate your feedback.
Somethings do well and need to be done in pots/ indoors before you get them out into your garden (long season crops like tomatoes, peppers), somethings not so much. A lot of it has to do with root architecture. Pay attention to what farms and farmers in your area are doing and replicate that.
Great. So plenty of time, even enough to plant more beans from seed. Something else to consider here too, those leaves that are dying off; they grew indoors in a different climate. It might be those leaves fall off and new leaves come in and you are off to the races.
This is more of a soil physics issue. I would consider this to be very, very young soil. Its a good thing that you combined your old soil with the new soil. But...
I think this might be getting us closer to your issue. When we drop in new soil, it doesn't have structure yet. This will come in time from roots creating holes, insects burrowing and digging around, etc. These actions will create pore and channels that water can infiltrate through. You really can't "short cut" structure. It just takes time to build and develop.
One additional consideration beyond the scope of your original question, but something I'll tell you because you'll almost assuredly hit this issue. Carbon eats nitrogen. Or at least, thats the anecdote, and its true enough to remember it. Garden soils you would buy from big box stores often do really well for a season, then people see a big drop in performance. Its usually because these soils are usually super carbon rich, and only have enough nitrogen for about 1/2-1/3 of a growing season. As this soil matures, you need to continuously add nitrogen to continue/ finish the composting process.
Any where from about one to one and a half tofu container per meter square. ish. Growing up we would dump our wood burning stove right into our garden beds whenever we cleaned it. Probably closer to several tofu containers per square meter. As long as there is no trash in it.
Plants love it. Phosphorus is the main limiting nutrient to plant growth globally. Effectively you are moving the phosphorus from where ever those trees were grown to your garden, and increasing its productivity. As long as your plants have everything else they need, they'll be phosphorus limited.
So it sounds like in terms of water your in the "plenty" range. But maybe its not able to penetrate or sticking around because of the age of your soil. Dig in there with your fingers and check.