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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 just put it on top
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Direct seed doesn’t work if pigeons inhabit your area.
Oh man. Don't get me started on this. I've had to reseed entire fields after crows walked down the aisles and literally just pecked where the seeds had been planted.
These days I've got feral chickens as my opponent, and they are far, far dumber than crows.
Their intellect is the problem with pigeons, they’ll see a bean sprout and think “oh that’s a worm!!” > pull it out > realize it’s inedible to them > “oh there’s a worm over there!!” > rinse and repeat until your entire plot is gone.
Two things are going on.
First the leaves - That is sunscald. It happens to plants that are raised under lower light conditions then exposed to direct sunlight.
Second the plant is experiencing transplant shock. This is a wound response from the roots being damaged during transplant. The plant has to pause it's rapid growth to heal it's roots and grow new ones. This can take a few weeks in severe cases.
Now for the good news - if the plant is sending out new dark green smaller leaves it's recovering from the damage and will eventually be fine.
Oh that is great to hear! Thanks for the info! I am very hopeful they will oull through
First: don't listen to me, I'm an idiot.
This looks to me like burned leaves due to moving them into UV light without some pre exposure from indoors. New leaves shouldn't have that problem, but the growth seems to be stunted. Also Afaik the plant will start building new roots after transplanting, which will appear like stunted growth. Give it two weeks, the just might bouncec back. I transplant beans just fine but you should keep them outdoors from the start if possible.
Haha I appreciate the honesty. Thanks for the reaponse. It sounds overall like I shocked it when I planted it and it will hopefully pull through
Did you inoculate the beans? https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/beans/soil-inoculants.htm
Beans need nitrogen fixing bacteria.
This is not a NEED. It depends on where you are. It also wouldn't explain the browning from the inside of the leaves, even if a fungus.
I didn’t! Mainly because I didn’t know I needed to. Is it too late you think?
It kind of looks like you're watering the leaves, and they're rotting or burning. Don't water the leaves of anything if you don't specifically need to.
Some extra info about what the soil that went into the raised beds may be useful though.
leaves, and they’re rotting or burning.
I agree this is a watering issue, but I don't think its leaf rot. I think the beans were root bound before outplanting, and that because this is a new bed, probably a clay layer formed (because it had not been significantly watered or grown in before), and the roots are not getting the access to water they need, or are the able to penetrate the clay layer, because they were root bound.
So even if they are watering, the plants might only have access to the top 5-10cm of soil.
It did rain several times since planting a week and a half or so ago. It has been rainly and overcast until a couple days ago when the sun came out and it has warmed up. I have not been directly watering the garden because I thought there has probably been enough rain. The bed I built is 8’x4’x6” bed which I filled with Coast of Maine Raised Bed mix:
https://coastofmaine.com/products/castine-blend-organic-raised-bed-mix
Do there plants have new growth without discoloration or wilting?
Yes there is some newer growth above this that looks normal (I’d say). But growth is way slower than it was just in the starter pots.
