BEAN. Phasolus. In the United States the bean is a tender annual, either dwarf or climbing, and is cultivated both for the succulent green pods and ripe seeds. The dwarf varieties vary in height from twelve to twenty-four inches, and require no poles.' The climbing varieties require poles for their support. There are varieties inter medial between the bush and climbing bean, but which do not require support as the White Mar row, one of the best of the white varieties to be used as dry, ripe beans. Among the varieties used as string beans, the Turtle Soup or Tampico. Bean produces abundant runners two feet or more in length. Beans when planted in drills—the usual and proper way for all the dwarf and half 'dwarf varieties—should be sown, as to the drills, thirty inches apart, to allow of horse cultivation; and if the drills are bedded up by running a horse hoe lightly between before sowing, on ordinary prairie land, it will increase their earliness and assist in the ease of cultivation, and subsequently the hilling with the horse hoe. When ripe, the crop is allowed to stand until the pods are quite dry, and pulled by the roots while moist with dew, the roots being pressed together in the hand and the handfulls set upon their tops in windows to dry. When sufficiently cured, they are to be laid loosely on scaffolds or laid around branched stakes, the roots in and the tops pointing down, to become quite dry before threshing. When threshed, the beans should be cleaned from the chaff in a fanning mill and be spread on a smooth airy floor and turned, from time to time, until they are entirely cured; thus they will not heat and mould when put in barrels. For the general crop of dry beans, they should not be planted until the days and nights are warm, or about the first week in June in the North, since the whole family are inter-tropical plants and exceedingly impatient, not only of frost, but cold storms. The pole varieties should be planted, the lower growing sorts three feet apart one way, by about two feet the other, and the taller climbers, as Scarlet Runners, Lima, etc., four feet one way, by three feet the other. Among the dwarf varie ties, the China Red-eye is one of the most hardy and also moderately early. Early Valentine is productive and among the earliest; planted in June, they will afford green pods in fifty days, and ripen in eleven weeks. Long Yellow Six
weeks is also among the earliest of the early sorts, productive and excellent for a string bean. The so-called wax varieties are now generally cultivated for their succulent pods. The White Kidney Bean makes an excellent family bean for shelling green, coming in about the time of the first green corn, and is much used for making succotash. The pole or running varieties are less hardy than the dwarf varieties, and must not be planted in the open air until the days and nights are permanently warm, or about the time the earliest peas come in blossom. The Carolina and large Lima are the best of their class. Concord is a good shell bean, healthy and vigorous. The Corn Bean makes an excellent string bean. In dian Chief known also as Wax and Butter Bean, makes an excellent string or shell bean. Sabre or Cimeter, is productive and an excellent string or shell beau, and valuable for pickling. Among those considered ornamental, may be mentioned the Scarlet Runner, the Painted Lady and the White Runner. In England, Horse Beans (vicia), a family different from the garden bean and the bean of commerce (Phaseolus). There are a num ber of varieties of the horse bean raised in Eng land as food for horses, and in Germany they are sown to some extent for soiling. All varieties of beans are considered to leave the soil open, porous and mellow. Again they are not an exhausting crop, notwithstanding the abundance of nutritive substance they contain, and this rich in azotized matter. The proportion of nutritive matter in beans, as compared with other grain is given by Einhof, as folio as: Von Thaer, in his experiments in feeding, to determine the value of beans as food for cattle, in his comparative estimate rates field beans as equal in value to one-third of wheat, and two thirds of Indian corn or barley. The probability is that in countries adapted to the crop, that beans and Indian corn will admirably supple ment each other in feeding, since Indian corn is rich in carbon, oil and starch, and beans are rich in nitrogen, as much as thirty per cent. of casein being found in the ripe seeds. Stock, however, must be learned to eat beans. We have never succeeded in getting any farm animals to eat beans except they were ground and mixed with grains.