Beans

The general information out there is that beans are easy to sprout.  You all remember growing beans when you were in elementary school - right?  And then there's the advice to soak them overnight beforehand in order to help them sprout.

Well, apparently not all beans follow this advice.  Without soaking the pinto beans had a 75% germination rate.  The kidney beans were about 40%.  The black beans, well out of a whole bed only about 10 sprouted. 

So I started over.  Well partially.  I didn't pull out the ones that sprouted but I prepped more to fill in the gaps.  Since I already had them on hand I started with pinto and kidney beans.  First I soaked them overnight.  That was more than enough for the pintos.  But I had to soak the kidney beans again because they jammed tight in the jar and not all of them got a good soak.

When I replanted the kidney beans yesterday, maybe 10% of them showed signs of starting to sprout already.  I'm hoping for good things.

When I got ready to replant pinto beans today I realized that almost every bean in the jar had started sprouting.  So I carefully transplanted and am keeping my fingers crossed.

The black beans I set to soaking yesterday.  I drained them this evening.  Tomorrow I'll plant them and we'll see what happens.  I think I'm going to plant several per hole in hopes of getting at least one plant per hole.

And I accidentally weeded out some of my cucumber plants before I realized it.  I'm going to give it a week and double check to see how much damage I did.  If it's too much then I'll pick up a couple of packs of pickling cucumbers to plant in the beds.  But since the ones I didn't weed out are still tiny babies I figure I probably didn't pull to many.

Anyways, fingers crossed for the beans to do well.  And I think I will make sure to set back seed this year so that I can be sure of its age and condition for planting.  I have a gut feeling that part of the problem is that the seeds I'm using are off of the store shelf and not packaged for planting.  There's no telling how long they had been sitting or what conditions they had been stored in.  But I can't find kidney beans packaged for planting at all.  And this year was the first time I ever saw black and pinto beans in seed packets.

Anyone else out there have some experience with these types of beans in the home garden?