Park Seed Algarve French Climbing Bean Seeds

They're expensive, but they ARE an awesome and prolific, wide "romano" style bean. Great germination rate (Spring 2025, Zone 9 Florida). Early to produce, good branching and easy to manage on a trellis, and flushes of beans continue through spring to early summer. Tender and tasty beans in the young to mid size range. They are not, however immune to all of Florida's foliar pathogens/blights (halo blight, bacterial leaf blight) or pests (nematodes). Our review photos were taken after we had already collected a huge amount of beans for our dinner (so you can imagine how many beans this one plant offered prior to our harvest. The beans remain tender for a decent amount of time (length / age of bean), but when they're about an inch wide, the skin may be become too tough for some, and you may want to use those more like "shelly" types, or just cook them longer. We planted our beans this year in a traditional "sisters" garden with corn, sunflowers, squash (bush butternut / C. moschata types), a few peppers, some broccoli and lettuce in the shade, some bush beans, some sweet peppers, and some celery in the "valley" of the corn hills, etc.). All of the "sisters" seemed happy and productive in this arrangement under low to medium input vegan-organic conditions. (No animal by-product fertilizers, and no pesticides or herbicides). We seeded our beans after our last frost, and after I had already set up a few rudimentary support structures for them (some bamboo poles I gathered from neighbors who offered their cut ones ones curbside :), and some cotton twine 3mm (also purchased from Amazon). As of May 28, 2025, our Algarve beans are still pumping out nightly harvests, but we are now seeing some foliar blights and signs that the root knot nematodes may already be buggering their roots, but they have definitely been some of the earliest, tastiest, and most productive Romano style beans we've ever grown, and some of the most resiliant (good branching, multiple waves of production, tolerant of sun or partial shade, and manageable "companions" to our corn and other garden "sisters." I think they are perhaps the BEST adapted and most prolific Romano to grow in Zone 9 Florida (and we've tried MANY). Just for fun we also planted yellow and purple varieties of Romanos as well (the purple are nearly as productive, but do get tougher and stringier MUCH faster than Algarve; the yellow Romanos tend to be less productive, but seem to remain tender longer. Algarve are more productive than Rattlesnake, more tender than Purple-podded pole, as productive as Monte Gusto (but Algarve has a much more interesting, complex flavor that is wonderful paired with stewed tomatoes, carrots, squash, and collards, or other in-season greens from your garden. Plant Algarve along with your other Florida and "deep south" tolerant beans, and see, like we plan to do, which variety / varieties are most well adapted to your garden's "climate change affected" microclimate, and which will be the "last standing" (last producing) when the nights get too hot for many beans to set flowers/pods.

These are in the ground for winter growth. They are doing good and as they should for a spring harvest.

As far as i'm concerned Derby is the Best bush bean. I have used them for years.Great flavor.

I have purchased these seeds from Park Seeds in the past. This year, our heirloom seeds picked up some moisture from somewhere and were not usable. As an alternate, we ordered several packages of these seeds for a very large arched trellis raised beds. These beds act as the entrance to our garden and we plant some kind of very leafy pole bean to create a beautiful green archway into our garden. My experience with Park Seed in the past has been satisfactory and they were the only people that had this strain of green bean available, so we ordered them a little late in the season. They were planted 3 weeks ago. Germination was rapid. Our garden faces due South and we have sun for most of the day, so seeds tend to germinate quickly in our 53 beds that we have. We had an almost 100% germination from these seeds. Now for the "con" part. When we received the packages, all of them looked kind of rugged. When we opened them, we discovered a good amount of seeds that were split in half and unusable. After opening all of the packages, about 10% of the seeds, collectively, were split. I say collectively because one of the bags had close to half of the seeds that were split and another had none. There were 6 packages total that were ordered over a few weeks time. If not for this, my review would have been 5 Stars. 4 Stars

As others have noted, the seed package was not dated but they are fresh. I planted 2 rows and I think every seed came up & they are thriving. I planted in June, so the soil was warm.

This was a complete disaster! I was really looking forward to growing these beautiful and delicious beans. But nothing germinated. I planted these at the same time with some other beans, such as, red runners. This is the only type that didn’t not germinate. I did it twice, still nothing. I suspect that the seeds were old crops. What makes this worse is that you can’t even return it. Buy from somewhere else!

The germination rate was very low, but the beans that do sprout and grow are great.

Excellent germination and production. Easy to grow. Easy to pick. They love growing with the sweet potatoes.