Flowering stage is the most crucial stage in the life cycle of any crop, or plant. When you see those flowers coming up in their variant colors, attracting insects, a farmer’s heart leaps with joy and anticipation. Now you know fruits are about to start forming and that means a yield at the end of the day. Some of those beautiful flowers are what attracts insects for pollination. Even in wind pollination we still need flowers. After pollination the fruits will start forming.
So as you can see flowers are crucial in crop production. You manage a crop well from the seed stage, and at the right conditions, then you get many flowers which can be managed to either get a lot of fruits and at your preferred size.
In bean farming, what a farmer needs most is the crop to produce as many flowers as possible and to not abort them. Many flowers translates to many bean pods and a good yield at the end of the season.
You might be wondering what flowers have to do with weeding, or how weeding affects flowering. I will tell you why.
As I have already told you earlier, flowering is a very sensitive stage in crop development that needs to be handled with so much care. Any carelessness in managing this stage, and you end up with aborted flowers meaning poor yield for you.
There are a number of threats to that fragile stage of a bean crop. Damp soils is one of the contributing factors to this stage; hailstorm another, which physically destroys the flowers; insect attack; and weeding which we are talking about today.
First weeding in beans should be done about two weeks after planting and after that you keep of the farm unless is handpicking weeds or while spraying incase there’s an insect attack. After first weeding the crop starts blooming and producing flowers. At that stage when you weed you might damage roots and cause stress that might lead to flower abortion. Also, as you touch the crop you can easily shake off the flowers. Hence is important to avoid your farm at that stage. But as I said, you can of course handpick weeds just don’t disturb the soil so much.
After the bean pods have formed you can now do your weeding and make sure there’s enough water for the crop. If your beans are rain-fed, then do the weeding when there’s rain and the soils are wet to avoid any stress on the crop. And remember not to pile soil on the rootstock. The pods might end up rotting when they touch the soil.
I hope this post helps bean farmers. You can leave your feedback in the comments box below.