Bean and its Cultivation

Beans are the seeds of legumes, vegetables used as human or animal food.They can be cooked in many different ways including boiled, fried and baked, and are used in many traditional dishes around the world.

Terminology

The word "bean" and its Germanic cognates (such as the German Bohne) have been in common use in West Germanic languages since before the 12th century,referring to broad beans, chickpeas, and other pod seeds.This was well before the New World Phaseolus was known in Europe.After contact between Europe and the Americas in the Columbian era, the use of the term extended to the pod seeds of leguminous plants, such as the common bean and runner bean, and the related genus Kidney.The term has long been applied generally to many other similar forms of seeds such as Old World soybeans, peas, other vetches, and lupines, and even to seeds that bear a slight resemblance, such as coffee Beans, Vanilla Beans, Castor Beans And Cocoa Beans. Thus, the term "bean" in common usage can refer to many different species. 

The seeds called "legumes" are often included in crops called "pulses" (legumes),although the words are not always interchangeable (usage varies by plant variety and region).The terms pulses and legumes generally refer exclusively to grain crops, and thus exclude those whose seeds are small and are used exclusively for non-grain uses (forage, hay, and silage), such as clover and alfalfa.The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defines "dried beans" (commodity code 176)as applicable only to Phaseolus species.This is one of various examples of how narrow senses enforced in trade regulations or botany can coexist in natural language with broad senses in culinary and general use; other common examples are the narrow sense of the word nut and the word nut broad sense, and the tomato is botanically a fruit, but is generally considered a vegetable in cooking and general usage.Relatedly, another usage detail is that several plants sometimes called legumes, including Vigna angularis (adzuki beans), mungo (black beans), radiata (green beans), and aconitifolia (moth beans), were once classified as Phaseolus but Later reclassified  but the revision of the classification did not completely stop the accepted meaning in common usage.

Cultivation

Unlike closely related peas, beans are a summer crop and require warm temperatures to grow.Legumes are able to fix nitrogen and therefore require less fertilizer than most plants.It usually takes 55-60 days from planting to harvest to mature.As the pods mature, they turn yellow and dry out, and the beans inside change from green to a ripe color.As vines, legume plants require external support, which may take the form of special "bean cages" or poles.Native Americans used to grow them alongside corn and squash (the so-called Three Sisters)with tall corn stalks supporting the beans.More recently, so-called "bush beans" have been developed, which require no support and all pods develop simultaneously (as opposed to pole beans, which develop gradually).This makes the bush bean more suitable for commercial production.