12 
The: Colorado Experiment Station 
be done by hand. Men follow the machine with pitch forks put¬ 
ting the cut beans into neat shocks. 
While a regular bean harvester is desirable and should always 
be used if there is any considerable acreage of beans grown, they 
may be harvested by using a breaking plow of the rod type, or by 
using a common sod plow with the mold board removed. Such ex¬ 
pedients are much better than hand work on patches an acre or 
more in size, but should only be used on small patches where the 
size of the patch is not large enough to justify the purchase of a 
regular harvester. 
One of the newer bean harvesters with bunching attachment 
Harvesting Period .—Opinions differ as to the proper time of 
harvesting. But experience and experimental work both show 
that if the beans are allowed to become completely ripe on the 
vine, heavy loss occurs from shattering. A good rule to follow 
is to harvest when the pods are turning yellow but have not yet 
dried out; at this stage there will usually be about half of the 
pods yellow ripe and a few still showing some green, providing 
the beans are ripening uniformly. When cut at this yellow-ripe 
stage, the beans will ripen up in the shock during the curing pro¬ 
cess and the loss in weight by drying out is very much less than the 
