{"id":267,"date":"2025-12-09T16:45:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T00:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/?p=267"},"modified":"2026-01-17T17:29:42","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T01:29:42","slug":"bean-rescue-attempt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/09\/bean-rescue-attempt\/","title":{"rendered":"Bean Rescue Attempt"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The beans in the strawberry patch have wide spacing between leaf nodes and very little foliage for plants that have been growing for about two months. I pruned off several of the oldest lower leaves that showed rust-like damage, which I suspect might be mites. I scheduled a three-round insecticidal soap treatment for the beans and potatoes, spaced four days apart, starting tomorrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think these beans took a hit from the heavy rain in November. That patch gets strong runoff from the awning, and the soil there was completely saturated. There’s a visible six-inch-wide strip where small pebbles seem to have settled from the flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today I pulled the straw mulch back a few inches from the stems to help warm the soil and scratched in a small amount of bone meal. I also lightly fertilized with Jack’s 20-20-20. I hadn’t fed these plants before since beans fix nitrogen, but after more reading it seems they still benefit from a light early boost. It’s not early for them now, but I wanted to test it anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also aerated the surrounding soil with a pitchfork, staying a few inches away from the stems. The top four inches feel reasonably loose, but below that it hits a dense layer, which is what all of the ground is like in this back yard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The compost pile reached 111\u00b0F this morning. The pumpkin pieces and dry leaves added this week are clearly active. I added a few more greens, including some spent coffee grounds that Alena picked up from Starbucks, along with some straw and dry leaves, and gave it a turn. It smelled a little worse than usual but not rancid, so I will be keeping an eye on that. The pile is finally at about 3′ x 3′ now; as I understand it, this is the smallest recommended size to get a true hot pile going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The beans in the strawberry patch have wide spacing between leaf nodes and very little foliage for plants that have been growing for about two months. I pruned off several of the oldest lower leaves that showed rust-like damage, which I suspect might be mites. I scheduled a three-round insecticidal soap treatment for the beans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":359,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":376,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions\/376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonfoust.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}