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I planted a row of climbing green beans in the spring and enjoyed good healthy plants; they flowered and grew plenty of delicious beans.

Now I am ready to tear them up and plant new seeds. My wife is distraught because she thinks the existing plants will flower again and give a second crop.

I have always thought climbing beans were a "one-and-done" plant. Will my existing healthy climbing bean plants flower again and give a second batch of beans?

P.S.- we are in California, it is mid-summer here now.

Jimmy Fix-it
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In the UK, what we call "runner beans" will continue flowering and setting seed until bad weather kills them, so long as you pick the beans when they are still young. That is exactly the same as how most annual plants develop.

If you let the beans ripen before you pick them, the plant's life cycle is then over and it will die.

If you have more beans than you want to eat, pick them and compost them instead of leaving them on the plants, so the plants will keep on trying to produce ripe seeds.

If you want to save your own seed for next year, leave the pods on one or two plants to ripen fully and reach the stage where they are too tough to be worth eating anyway. Bean flowers are self-fertile and the seed grows true to the parent variety, so you can harvest your own seed every year for a long as you want to keep growing beans, with no deterioration in the quality of the crops.

alephzero
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