How to grow yardlong beans for high yield? A detailed guide to cultivation methods

Yardlong bean, also called cowpea, is a very common vegetable in our daily lives, with excellent nutrition and taste, and today the area planted with yardlong beans is also very wide, especially in rural areas where every household uses vacant land to grow some, partly because it has low soil requirements and is very easy to grow. But some yardlong beans keep producing no matter how much you harvest, while others stop bearing after just one harvest, so today Qinnong Net brings you high-yield cultivation methods for yardlong beans, let's learn together.

1. Choose good seeds

There are now a great many varieties of yardlong beans, including red-skinned yardlong beans, local yardlong beans and hybrid yardlong beans. We can select seeds by taking into account the various growing conditions of our location. Generally, we can select two to three of the most cost-effective varieties at once for mixed planting, which can increase the yield of yardlong beans to a certain extent, and at the same time new types of yardlong beans will appear, improving the quality of the yardlong beans.

2. Land preparation and sowing

If it is only for your own consumption, then there are no requirements for land preparation, but if you want high yield it is best to choose fertile soil that does not easily accumulate water, and deep-plough it together with base fertilizer. The base fertilizer is mainly farmyard manure or livestock manure, averaging about three thousand jin per mu. Yardlong beans can now be sown throughout all four seasons, but the best yield and quality come from sowing in April. Before sowing, we can sun-dry the seeds for two days, then soak them in warm water for twenty-four hours, and finally take them out and soak them in a chemical agent, which can promote the speed of germination and also enhance the plant's resistance. After the seeds are treated, we can sow them by drilling or by hole sowing, evenly scattering the seeds at a row spacing of forty cm and a plant spacing of thirty cm, then covering them with soil.

3. Water and fertilizer management

When the yardlong bean seedlings grow to about four or five cm, we should water them so they have enough water to grow, and then when the seedlings grow to about twenty cm we should carry out the first intertillage and weeding together with fertilization. For this fertilization, we can use diluted manure and urine water mixed with about thirty jin of urea for irrigation. Then we wait until flowering before fertilizing again, at which time we mainly spray potassium fertilizer and phosphorus fertilizer. The most important thing is fertilization after harvest, which can prevent the yardlong bean seedlings from aging, so that they grow new branches and leaves, and flower and set pods, which is why other people's bean pods are never exhausted by harvesting.

4. Trellising and pinching off the growing tip

Trellising is a very important step for increasing yardlong bean yield. If you do not trellis them and let them crawl and grow on the ground, you will basically not see any yardlong beans, so we generally start trellising when the seedlings grow to about thirty cm, and we must manually help the seedlings onto the trellis, because they cannot climb up the trellis on their own. Another method to increase yardlong bean yield is that when the seedlings grow to about sixty cm we need to pinch off the growing tip of the main shoot, and then it will grow side branches, and then repeat the same action in turn until you feel it is appropriate.

5. Removing leaves and thinning flowers

Another method to increase yardlong bean yield is to gently remove some of the weaker flowers and flowers damaged by pests during the peak flowering period, which can reduce nutrient loss and also prevent flower drop, thus keeping losses to a minimum. Finally, when the yardlong beans are formed, we should remove some of the surrounding leaves so the yardlong beans can carry out full photosynthesis, enhancing the airiness of the field, and also reducing the loss of nutrients and water.