How to Grow Sword Beans for High Yield? Latest Planting Techniques and Methods Tutorial
The sword bean is a great vegetable for pickling in jars. Every year when the sword beans ripen, my family buys a big bunch of sword beans and yardlong beans together to make pickled tea or dry them for pickling in jars. They taste crisp and refreshing and whet the appetite. So how do you grow sword beans to get a high yield? Let's find out together.
1. Site Selection and Fertilization
The sword bean prefers a warm environment and is not tolerant of cold. It is not strict about soil requirements and can grow and develop normally in soil with a pH value between 5.0-7.5, but to increase its yield, it is best to choose well-drained sandy loam. The sword bean has a long growth period, around 240 days, and has a large demand for fertilizer. It needs 40 kg of compound fertilizer, 40 kg of superphosphate and 20 kg of potassium sulfate per mu as base fertilizer. Mix these evenly with the soil, then level and harrow the bed, and wait until sowing.
2. Sowing and Raising Seedlings
The seed coat of the sword bean is hard and absorbs water slowly. Before sowing, soak the seeds in warm water at 30 degrees for 15 hours to allow them to absorb enough water and help them sprout. If raising seedlings in nutrient pots, they are generally transplanted when they have 2 true leaves, with about 1200-1500 plants per mu; if direct sowing, sowing can be done in late March, also requiring seed soaking before sowing. You can open holes in the bed surface and sow, sowing 1-2 seeds per hole, then cover with soil and mulch after sowing.
3. Fertilizer and Water Management
The sword bean has a large fertilizer requirement and needs fertilizing after emergence, but the concentration should be watched during the seedling stage. Generally, 2-3 applications of dilute fertilizer water are given as a seedling-promoting fertilizer; flowering and fruiting is the period of greatest fertilizer demand, when root fertilization can be combined with foliar fertilization, spraying 2-3 times with monopotassium phosphate. After pod setting, when the pods grow to about 10 cm, apply 20-40 kg of compound fertilizer in the rows. This fertilization is quite important and is closely related to yield.
4. Field Management
The sword bean has a high pod-setting rate. To prevent the plants from lodging, before flowering and pod setting, weed, fertilize and earth up the soil, and at the same time set 1-meter-high stakes beside the main stem to secure it. When the plant reaches 70 cm tall, pinch it off, pinch off the stems on the opposite side of the podding furrow, promptly thin out and prune the old and diseased leaves on the lower part of the plant, and cut off side branches with no flowers or few flowers, so as to improve ventilation and light conditions and increase the pod-setting rate.
The above is an introduction to high-yield sword bean growing techniques. We hope it helps you. To learn more related knowledge, please stay tuned to us.