Bush and climbing beans are better to sow in well warmed soil. If you plant them earlier, although they will germinate rapidly, they will not give you a good crop compared to when planted in warm soil.
If you start to sow them this week, with additional plantings every 3 weeks until January, they will give you plenty of produce to eat and freeze for the year.
Seeds can be sown about 3 cm deep, 10cm apart and watered in immediately.
Beans are not great fans of acid soil, so if you have an area that was previously limed that would be an advantage. If not, you can add dolomite or limestone now at about a handful per sq metre. Beans also love blood and bone, so a big handful of that per sq metre also is good to use.
When the plant starts to produce succulent pods, pick them as fast as you can, and keep that going until the season ends – it is best to pick the beans, even if you need to discard them, rather than allowing them to mature when they become coarse and flag to the bush to stop producing.
Once they start to hold heavy pod loads, you can support them by hilling the soil around the stem.
Once winter comes and they start to die, cut them back to the ground and watch them re-shoot next spring.
There are a lot of varieties of beans but some worth looking at are the Scarlet Runners, Blue Lake and Purple Kings, all great produces and beautiful to look at.
And just when you think your beans have given enough, remember that they are a good manure crop, meaning they take nitrogen from the air and put it into the soil, and if you have too many, just chop them down and let them sit on the soil to become part of the ecosystem.
Enjoy
Peter