How to Grow Black Beans from seeds in your vegetable garden. Looking for a new plant to grow in your garden this year? Try growing black beans! They’re easy to grow, produce a good yield and store great for recipes!
It’s the beginning of March which means your garden has already crossed your mind. We’ll start planting our seeds indoors (tip: check out my post on how to germinate seeds!) in about a week for our Spring garden, but it’s never too early to start planning for Summer. Whenever I post a black bean recipe I get a few readers that say they want to grow black beans. You know what? You should! You all should!
If you are looking for a new plant to grow in your 2017 garden, why not try dry black beans?
How to Grow Black Beans
The black beans we always grow are Midnight Black Turtle Soup beans from Johnny Seeds. We’ve had year after year success with them so if you’re looking for a recommendation, get them. We grow our black beans in the “beans” garden bed where they grow alongside dry white beans, soy beans and green beans.
To get a idea of how much time they take to grow, last year we planted black beans (directly in the soil) on May 29 and we pulled them to dry on September 10. On average they take 100-110 days to fully mature, ours took 104 days to be exact.
The way that you know the plants are done is when the plants topple over and turn brown. The other trick is is to shake the bean pod. If you hear the beans rattling around then you know they’re full developed and ready to be picked.
You’re going to want to hang up your black bean plants to dry for a week so just yank up the entire plant and tie up in some place that will remain dry. We usually ties ours up in our garden shed. Once they’re all dry, now comes the fun/terrible part – time to individually pick each pod off the plant, break it open and remove the beans. And just like you have black beans to use and store.
Tips on Growing Black Beans
Tips/Info:
If you intend on eating these often, I would suggest growing 15 plants per person. This should last you throughout all the seasons until you grow again. If you really love black beans, grow even more! The black beans won’t go bad, so it’s not like you’ll be wasting them if you grow too many.
Black beans are incredibly easy to take care of, they are kind of no nonsense plants. Plant them, water them occasionally, give them sunshine and they’ll grow without any additional help.
You can grow these in the ground or in containers – both work great.
For a timeline, this is about 2 weeks after planting the seed directly in the soil.
And this is half way through the growing period, around 50 days. This is our garden bed filled with just beans!
Me as the black bean lady. The beans were just picked and now they’ll hang in the shed for a week.
And then the most tiring part… popping open the pods and taking out the beans! If you’re growing lots of beans, put aside a entire afternoon for this.
Once they’re all removed from the pods, store in a jar, preferably glass jar so you can admire them. Beans store wonderfully, I don’t think I’ve ever had beans that went bad.
My favorite part of growing Summer dry beans is being able to eat them in the middle of Winter when it’s 30 degrees out. It really makes Summer gardening feel special!
Hope you enjoyed learning about black beans and I hope you try growing them! As always if you have any growing questions leave them in the comments section.
Tip: Once you have black beans, try my Instant Pot Black Beans and Black Bean Tacos!
Tip 2: Looking for the best green beans to grow?
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LISA WELCH says
Is it possible to grow black beans in south Fl? Sometime in June I planted 15 beans in a container, all of them sprouted, and all but one died. The one that lived is only about 6 inches tall and seems to just be going nowhere. It’s been well over 100 days. Any ideas??
Amy says
Hi can I use black beans from the store to grow my plants? I assume you just use some of your harvest from the previous year to grow the ne t years right?
Mary Ritzel says
I watched a video recently where the author put all her drying beans in a pillow case and thumped it on the ground and then once broken used a fan or hair dryer to blow off the light bits. 😁 Thought you’d like that!
LINDA QUIST says
Your blog is great, every simple and plain to read, wonderful pictures. I needed to know if they only producted once. I grew my beans for the first time this year (Central Texas) and now are done and ready to harvest, ony problem is I did’t plant enough plants! But still have time to grow some more:))
Taro Eldredge says
Dear Brooklyn Farm Girl,
I came to this site because I didn’t know how beans, and black beans in particular, were grown. To be honest, the conversation began with a discussion of growing garbanzo beans (unclear if you know anything about that–I plan to investigate that next), but we moved on to black beans. Now I know about how black beans grow. My friends and I really appreciated the photos. We were particularly delighted by the image of the pod with the black beans inside it. It was so exciting! One of us thought there would be a branch with individual beans on it. He was very wrong (he’s usually pretty smart, but he messed up on this one. And he owns up to the huge mistake). Another friend will soon be growing black beans in her DC urban garden–another farm girl!
Thank you so, so much for providing us with this deeply valuable information.
Love,
A group of friends going crazy on a zoom call
Donna Cromb says
Thanks for the info, I also wanted to know if I needed to stake them and how tall they grow
Mrs Powell says
I appreciate the great details in your instructions and photos. I am confident that I will be successful growing Black Beans.
RC says
Thanks for all the details, especially the number of plants per person. Did you have to trellis your beans? How far apart did you space them?
AtlanticIslandsuz says
Where do you purchase your seed for black beans?
Pamela says
We use Midnight Black Turtle Soup beans from Johnny Seeds. You can also find black beans on Amazon (there’s a link in post) or at your local garden center.
Jackie says
Thank you! I popped some black beans from a bag in a clothe pot and they popped up in 2 days! I was like, now what do I do! Thanks again!
Pamela says
Have fun growing black beans! Send me pictures of the harvest when you pick them! 🙂
Heather Andrews says
Can you then use some of your harvest, to plant as seeds for the next crop?