Kitchen Garden Forum

I've just seen some of these seeds on sale in the market, but I cannot find out much about 'wax beans' in the UK, most internet stuff is from the US.
Some seem to class them as french beans and some as runners.
So what is a wax bean, does anyone have any experience of them, the common theme seems to be that they are ready for harvest in under 60 days!

What Americans call wax beans we would call French beans. 60 days is a not unreasonable prediction for time to maturity if you grew them in Iowa, but with our rather more capricious climate it's an extremely rough estimate. Many US seed catalogues print how many days to maturity in the sense of it meaning day degrees, or GDD. It is a useful metric for seedsman who are selling to customers across a broad range of climate zones.

I've experimented with a couple of varieties of yellow wax beans (a type of dwarf French bean) last year and sadly didn't have a lot of success because they didn't germinate at all well. I grew Sonesta and another variety whose name escapes me. They were lovely and colourful to eat but having sown about 30 seeds of two varieties I only ended up with half a dozen plants from the first sowing. A second sowing didn't fare any better. I shall sow the remainder of my packets this year and try again in the hope that better weather will bring an improved result but am not banking on it. They certainly didn't like the cold wet weather.

Mine did OK year before last but didn't rate them - not a patch on the good old green ones - but are colourful on the plate & were good in the bean salad with a bit of dressing.

Westi

Thanks, Good to know, but maybe I won't get too excited about them