It seems that nature is compensating us with these beans against the losses we have experienced with our other crops this year. We have earlier planted corn in this very spot where Daddy wanted to grow some corn for the family, and we ended up harvesting nothing from it. First the drought affected the corns, and then later herdsmen wickedly took their cows through the farm where they are up the remaining surviving corns.
Since we do not have another location for our family subsistent farming, Daddy decided to plant beans in the same location again.
He has hence been guarding the farm more diligently against cow invasion. And if we get lucky with this, we would be harvesting a lot of beans this year.
There is a way your crops will grow so well to give you hope and a prediction of a good harvest. Hopefully the rains will last till the end of October, keeping the soil moist enough until the beans start producing grains. It has taken much longer than I had expected. The beans ought to be producing seeds by now, but it is a very common thing that this crop will continue to its vegetative growing phase since it is enjoying an abundance of rainfall. That is the reason you can see just how much the beans have spread to cover the whole space.
While planting these beans, we gave them a space of at least 0.5–1 m, and now they have all grown and covered the spaces.
I remember asking dad to teach me about the adequate spacing needed for planting beans because I didn't want to plant them too close and have the beans all struggling for space. I think that is beginning to play out even though we have them enough space.
One must learn about the spacing requirements for planting each crop; it is one of the criteria important for grains to produce well. Overcrowding of crops most times leads to low yields. Beans may not have much issues with that, as you can see how they are all growing and spreading themselves across the ground, but with rice plants, overcrowding is usually very noticeable, and the rice will not be able to grow or expand well, not to mention produce quality seed or yield.
With our beans at the flowering stage, we have ordered pesticides from the store; it seems like that particular chemical is scarce this year.
One of the major requirements for growing beans is the addition of that pesticide. The bean plant is usually infested by pests; aside from the weevils that affect the crops at storage, the growing vegetative plant is often easily attached by pestilence; hence, it is compulsory to add pesticides to growing beans at the flowering stage.
The pesticides are added on a weekly basis until the harvest of beans commences. We are at that stage and waiting for the chemical to arrive so that we can continue with that. Some of our other farm friends here have gotten theirs and would commence applications too by next week.
