Every garden room should have some beans. Bush beans can be grown in 10″ pots and they don’t need a lot of fertilizer. It is tough to get them enough light so they would produce as heavily as they would under the full sun, but they have another advantage.

Beans trap small flying insects. Their little legs get caught in the hairs found on the underside of the leaves and stems, and they cannot escape continuing flying around your garden room.

That’s right, every bean you plant is a merciless killer, attracting flying insects to its luscious foliage and trapping them until they die.

For this reason, every garden room should grow a few beans.

All the beans I’ve ever grown had these hairs.

There are wide varieties of beans and this is why I don’t say all.

I usually grow some sort of a bush green bean in my garden room. The word “bush” when referring to beans means that they will grow without support, as opposed to varieties like Kentucky Wonder which are vines and require a string or something for support.

The bush varieties, though not as tall, and having more of a stem, will still tend to be able to grip a string, with those same hairs that trap insects, and this can help keep them from diverging to other lights in the grow room. If you look carefully at this image of a Royal Burgundy bush green bean, you will see the string that the thin stem is holding. There is a second string, which is there to adjust the height of the light. That second one is loosely coiled.

While the varieties that are usually dried also catch small insects, they are very easy to grow as a field crop and mechanically harvest. The prices are very low for them, and you do not, generally, eat them fresh anyway, so I do not grow them.

Beans, death traps for gnats, food for you!