French Beans taking over

I am afraid to go to my plot :homy:  I have never had much success with French Beans although we love them, the climbing ones have always fell foul to the wind and the dwarf ones seem always to be spindly and not amount to much.  Anyway this year I had the bright idea of direct sowing all the seed from all the packets I had, in the hopes I would get something out of them.  Guess what every single one of them germinated and have gone on to become really healthy plants.  I now have 120 climbing and close to 100 dwarf plants and they are all beautiful and bushy.  The bed looks like a meadow with all the flowers on them - if all the flowers become beans I don't know what I am going to do with them.  I have never had a real glut of anything on the plot but it looks like that is going to change very soon.  Is there anyway I can stagger the crop at this stage e.g. could I remove some of the flowers?

You could let pods mature and dry and save them as dried beans for eating later in the year. We have an Italian man at our site who does this and half his plot each year is dwarf bean plants 

Hope that idea helps

Gosh, that is a huge amunt of plants. I direct sowed mine too with the climate being friendlier here, and from fifteen climbing plants I fed whoever in the village would take them and have far too many frozen. When I (and the village) got fed up I did what the Italian man does and let the rest seed. I now have a mountain of seed fr cooking or anyone who wants to grow their own. Trouble is, I forgot they were black! They will make interesting baked beans!!!