For climbing beans, you can hurry things along by pinching out the growing tips. This works quite well if you’ve planted a little later in the season, and you could use the technique to get a last planting in now, especially if you have a polytunnel/greenhouse…
Most climbing beans will climb their supports and reach head height before you pinch out the growing tips. However, if you have planted later in the season, it works well to pinch them out earlier, and treat them as a semi-dwarf variety. We’ve done an experiment very successfully with borlotti beans in the past, allowing half the plants to grow to one metre tall, and the other half to grow to two metres. The plants that were pinched out at one metre produced a crop about three weeks ahead of the others, and they matured faster too.
If you’ve planted in July, or if you wanted to plant a few in a greenhouse or polytunnel in early August, you could use this technique to get the plants producing pods nice and quickly. Let them grow as normal, and just snip the growing tips once they reach one metre tall. It is that simple.