Vegetable · Fabaceae
When to plant lima beans
Slower and more heat-loving than a green bean, and grown for the flat seed rather than the pod. Pole types out-yield bush types by a wide margin.
Sow direct
2 weeks after
Counted from your last spring frost.
Days to maturity
75-95
From sowing to a first picking.
Frost tolerance
Tender
How much cold the plant itself will take.
Those weeks become real dates once you name a place.
Timing, in frost-relative terms
Seed packets rarely give calendar dates, because a date that suits one latitude is wrong at another. They give offsets from the last spring frost instead, and those offsets are what make lima beans plantable anywhere.
- Sow direct 2 weeks after the last frost.
- Expect 75–95 days to maturity, counted from sowing.
Getting the timing right
Sow two weeks after the last frost into soil at 18C or warmer. Sowing into cold soil is the single commonest cause of failure with this crop.
Frost tolerance
Killed at 0C. Flowers drop rather than set if nights stay above 25C, so extreme heat is as much a problem as cold.
Classified as tender, with damage expected below 0°C (32°F)32°F (0°C).