Bear with me, I’m bean serious
If a gardener planted pole beans after the final spring frost, the vines would be producing by now. Rains have passed on by, hardly got the wheelbarrow wet, but bean vines persevere.
There are more than 400 varieties of beans in the world plus thousands of local versions. Beans have fun names: pinto, adzuki, cannellini, turtle, cobra, rattlesnake, red swan, purple tepee… plus the pods (shells) can be colorful. Even locally, it’s easy to find seeds for green, yellow or speckled beans, and seed catalogs offer a tour of the bean world: yellow or green pods streaked with purple; another with pods of an ancient, honest purple; another is a striking magenta but 18 inches long, all of which are tempting to someone who hasn’t grown everything yet.
It’s a world history lesson to see what seeds are for sale. Adzuki beans are native to the Himalayas, mung beans from India, Anasazi beans from the Four Corners area. At first, beans were a vine growing wild in the middle part of our hemisphere. Gardeners spread them north and south, Columbus took them to Europe, somebody took them to Africa, and Bob and Judy took them to Asia where they became very popular.
Gardeners everywhere like beans. We plant them in early spring after the final frost and again in early summer for beans in autumn. Somebody should write a song called “Beans in Autumn.” The original bean varieties were vines that needed support. Bush varieties are a recent development. They produce beans in a fairly short burst, while pole beans keep producing for a while. I once had Ozark Purple pole beans last until the first frost.
Folks refer to beans eaten fresh – pod and all – as snap beans. Our progenitors, however, depended on being able to dry varieties of beans for later use, and along the way bred a painter’s palette of colors onto bean varieties. Turtle beans are black, others are red, brown, white, white with black specks, black with white eyes, etc. An early gardener would have kept the dried beans dry through the winter somehow, depended on them for dinners and saved some for planting in spring… gardeners through history all over the globe perpetuating their own bean varieties.
Growing beans for drying takes longer because the pods with beans inside must remain on the vines until the pods are totally dry and leaves are yellow and about to fall. Shake the pod and you can hear the beans rattle. Somebody should write a song called “Hear the Beans Rattle.” If rain is imminent, you can pull up the vines with pods attached and hang them in a dry spot somewhere such as your living room or a shed.
Once the pods are totally dry, open them and spill the beans into a jar for storage. It is important to note that some dry beans are toxic when eaten raw. Red kidney and cannellini beans, in particular, contain enough of the toxic substance lectin, they can make humans sick in the belly for a while if eaten raw. Great Northerns and pintos also, but it’s easy to neutralize the lectin. Smarty pants food scientists recommend soaking the beans overnight, or at least five hours or so, and then putting them to a slow boil for a half hour.
For the garden, an extra benefit of growing beans is the plants naturally increase the nitrogen available to other plants. Bacteria in nodules on bean roots absorb nitrogen to make food for the plant but leave excess in the soil after the plant is gone. Cool.
Beans is big business. Bean counters claim India produces one out of every five beans grown in the world. China sells to Hong Kong but buys from Canada, U.S. buys beans from Mexico and Guatemala but sells beans to Canada who sells green beans to the U.S. Maybe we should just eat our own beans.