Pinching out Broad Beans

[DazzerelliParticipant]

Do you pinch out the growing tip on your Broad Beans? My October sown Aquadaluce Claudias are between 30cm and 60cm tall and are flowering. There is no sign of Blackfly. I’ve heard that I should be pinching out the growing tip when they start flowering but this seems a bit soon as I’ve read that these beans grow to over 1m tall. Should I wait a while? The reason often given for the pinching is to direct the plant to put more energy in to developing the beans than producing more growth and flowers but I would have thought that the pinching would encourage more growth from the base of the plant.

Cheers,

Darren

[charlesModerator]

 Hi Darren,

Good stuff here, you are working out all the growth possibilities. It depends what you want, if pinched out now you should have earlier beans but yes, the plants still want to grow a lot more. Stems do elongate after losing their growing point: I am going to pinch out a few tops next week, a nice green for salad or cooking, and leave some to spread the harvest, all being well. Actually we are forecast hard frost this weekend so that may knock out some flowers anyway.

[DazzerelliParticipant]

Thanks for the advice Charles. The technique and the reasoning sounds like that applied to Tomato plants. I had not thought of pinching shoots out at different times to spread the harvest over a longer period, I think I’ll try it this year.

Darren

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