Those of you who have attempted to navigate my backyard know I grow pole beans up pretty much any structure that will support them. It can make parts of the backyard seem like a jungle towering over your head, but why wouldn’t I? If a piece of ground can produce food, really, why would you not want it to? Above is shown a re-purposed 3 sided structure we call the bean house. It is made from parts salvaged from a tornado damaged gazebo (not ours, we don’t have a gazebo) and it is home every year to a blanket of pole beans. This year it is a few volunteers, plus Purple Podded Pole, and 3 fledgeling grape vines.
This is a volunteer bean vine. All of those yellow pods you see are from just one plant. Yesterday I picked 4 gallons of fresh pods of various types of beans. Ran out of energy last night, and time, processing tomatoes. At the moment my canner is heating up so that I can get the red sauce canned, then will start in on all the beans I have stashed in the fridge.
That is a dried Christmas Lima pole bean. These we save only for winter stews and soups as a dry bean. When saving for planting seed, only the pods with 3 seeds get carried over to plant next year. All of the ones with one or two seeds go into the general soup beans.
The variations in depth of color you see is due only to some seeds being more dry than others. I learned the hard way, years ago, to not put the beans into storage until they are really completely dry, which can take a while since summers are so humid. We will not put these into jars until late fall.
I have a bunch of cheap aluminum turkey roasting pans that are wide, have handles, and the bean seeds stay in those, occasionally being put out into the sun, NEVER left out in a rain, and exposed to air for months. Properly dried and stored beans will last, as a viable food source, pretty much forever. Another note: ALL regular beans can be used as dry beans. If you find that you have left your snap beans on the vines too long to use for fresh eating, let them dry there. You can save the best for planting next year, and the rest can be shelled along with any other beans for winter eating. In the photo above are Golden, Dragon Tongue, Rattlesnake, Yellow Pencil Pod, Burpee Stringless, Christmas Lima, and maybe a few other I am not remembering at the moment. Hopefully by fall we have a couple of gallons of various types dried and stored away.
Your beans are beautiful!’
Bad year for beans here… It rained…
We’ve had so many years of drought, I don’t seem to know how to garden when it rains… 🙂
Oh yeah… Those are some gorgeous beans!!!
Very nice camera work.
Has been an interesting year honestly. Not like the last couple. Just had nearly a month without temps getting much above 80, and most in the mid 70s with nights in the high 50s. That means my Scarlet Runner beans are set heavy too. Have gotten nearly nothing from them last few years, now I am wishing I planted more. Field plantings did not do as well, but will still be ok. No real rain here for a few weeks, but that is good for drying things down.
Tom – I planted Scarlet Runner beans for the first time this year. No beans :(. After I planted them I read they can be toxic if not cooked properly. What do you do with your Scarlet Runners?
well, all bean (seeds) are toxic. So are peaches. issue is levels of toxicity. With dry beans, you soak them completely submerged for at least 24 hours before cooking, and rinse in clean water before cooking as well. The fermentation which occurs (and you can soak them longer too) eliminates (as I understand) the very low toxic levels they have. Scarlet Runner beans are hit or miss for me. In a hot summer they will flower beautifully all summer, but you are lucky to get a single pod. A summer like we had here, with long cool stretches, and the vines are loaded with beans. They are native to areas where the temperatures stay in a range of 45-65 degrees year round, and are a perennial. I plant them every year because in a good year I will get a few gallons of seeds from just 10′ of trellis, and the hummingbirds love them regardless. If temperatures get over 80 degrees though, they flowers abort instead of setting pods. If the pods are already set, but immature, they do not seem to suffer, but it is one bean that likes it cool and not hot. Hot summers all the other beans do gangbusters, but you lose the runner beans. Oh well. If all of your summers are always blistering hot, I would shy away from the runner beans unless you just grow them for the beautiful flowers.
As an aside, so far as I know in commonly grown beans, only castor beans are going to kill you right quick, hyacinth are only edible at certain stages, and fava beans will kill anyone who has a genetic makeup in which favism is an issue. (rare overall, but not rare in certain genetic populations)