Vegetable · Fabaceae
When to plant green beans
Quick, reliable and worth sowing three times across a season.
Sow direct
1 week after
Counted from your last spring frost.
Days to maturity
50-60
From sowing to a first picking.
Frost tolerance
Tender
How much cold the plant itself will take.
Those weeks become real dates once you name a place.
Timing, in frost-relative terms
Seed packets rarely give calendar dates, because a date that suits one latitude is wrong at another. They give offsets from the last spring frost instead, and those offsets are what make green beans plantable anywhere.
- Sow direct 1 week after the last frost.
- Expect 50–60 days to maturity, counted from sowing.
- Sow again every 14 days for a continuous supply.
Getting the timing right
Sow a short row every two weeks from one week after last frost until ten weeks before first frost. Beans crop heavily for a fortnight then decline, so succession matters more than quantity.
Frost tolerance
Beans are killed by the lightest frost at any stage. They also germinate poorly below 15C, so patience in spring pays.
Classified as tender, with damage expected below 0°C (32°F)32°F (0°C).