Nourishing Your Heart From the Garden-Beans
With February being heart health month, some of the avid gardeners out there may be wondering, “What are some vegetables I can grow in my garden that benefit my heart?” In fact, one of the simplest vegetables you can grow that offers a plethora of heart health benefits is beans! Beans are rich in fiber, which helps our heart by lowering cholesterol in the body. They’re also rich in important heart-healthy nutrients, including potassium and magnesium. So, how do we grow them?
What’s important to know about beans in the garden is that, in addition to being heart-healthy and nutritious, they’re easy to grow, typically generate large harvests, can cook and store easily, and can even fix nitrogen into your soil in certain instances. Beans also come in a wide variety of tastes, colors, and textures for use in the kitchen. These include bush snap beans, pole beans, shelling beans, long beans, and southern peas.
Bush snap beans, more commonly known as green beans, produce tender pods that are eaten whole. Grown in the garden, they must be harvested before the seeds within the pods enlarge, which can create an undesirable rocky or chewy texture. Shelling beans, on the other hand, are grown to fully mature the seeds, typically leaving pods on the plants until they are fully dried before harvesting. Pole beans grow vining plants that are typically trellised and are easier to reach over the shrub form of the types previously mentioned. Also requiring trellising, long beans are the largest beans available for the home garden, with pods that can reach up to 3 feet in length. Their cousins, southern peas or cowpeas, grow in both bush and vining types.
Typically, bean seeds are sown in mid-May when soil temperatures reach 55–90 degrees Fahrenheit, or for a fall crop, they are sown in July. Bloom timing is one of the most critical aspects for success, as beans planted during hot spells may struggle to set pods, reducing both quality and yield.
Some tips for success include not soaking the beans before planting (they don’t need it and may rot), avoiding a crust on the soil surface when watering (they’ll struggle to break through it), avoiding salty locations, not overfertilizing, and remembering they have shallow roots –be careful with cultivators!
Other heart-healthy crops worth exploring include spinach, kale, sweet potatoes, and other cruciferous vegetables. You can learn about these and more in our Dig Your Dinner archive through the links below:
DYD: Spilling the Beans on Beans
DYD: Cool Cabbage and Crisp Kale
DYD Playlist
by Anthony Reardon, Horticulture Small Farms Agent, 2026