Before I started gardening I thought that green beans were boring. The thing on your plate to fill the vegetable portion of the plate. Not bad, but not memorable. Once I started gardening, though, I became a green bean enthusiast.
Green beans grown in a garden, picked in the warmth of the afternoon, and eaten raw are a summer pleasure. Those same beans, blanched until bright green and frozen, are a mid-winter luxury.
Green beans that haven’t waited a week between being picked and being eaten are mildly sweet, with a side note of umami and a moist crunch that grocery store beans just don’t have.
My favorite green beans are pole beans. In an urban garden they can grow up poles or strings at one side of the garden, making an ever-more-dense summer privacy blind, but only needing an 18 inch strip. While bush beans mature two waves and then are finished (which is very convenient for all-at-once freezing and canning) pole beans continue to produce from mid-summer till the first frost as long as the plants are kept watered and picked. Like the vegetable version of the Energizer Bunny, these beans just keep on producing.
In the spring we moved the pig fence to a new part of the pasture. In the place where the pigs were the year before, we dug four parallel trenches, leaving just enough room to walk between them, and filled them with composted chicken litter and rabbit poop, and then returned the soil. Into these shallow hills we planted our beans. To trellis them, we had 2 by 2’s on hinges set into the ground every 3 feet. Old fencing got stapled to these, with cord strung above from support as support for the tallest climbers to find. As the beans wind their way up the fencing, a dense green tunnel is formed. The slanting sides mean that most of the beans will hang down inside the tunnel so they are easier to find. Some do hide though, so I have to go up and down the inside and out a couple of times to get them all. If you leave too many beans to get mature, the vine will stop producing.
Every year I try new open-pollinated and heirloom types of pole bean, along with my two favorites: rattlesnake and purple podded. With each year having changes in weather, pests, and variable soil, I never know which beans with give me a bumper crop, and which beans will under-perform. I figure a variety of types helps to even things out. This year, besides those two, I grew Sultan’s Crescent (see the top photo), Gold of Bacau, Missouri Wonder, and then some that are triple purpose.
Triple purpose beans are good when young as snap beans, and also good when the bean seeds have gotten bigger but the outside bean hasn’t dried out. Those seeds are cooked without drying them first, and called ‘shelly beans’ or ‘green shell’ beans. The third purpose is to let them dry on the vine and then husk the seeds to use as dried beans for soups and baked beans. The triple purpose beans I’m growing this year are Trail of Tears, Greasy Grits, Lazy Wife, and Turkey Craw. All but the Trail of Tears beans are producing well now, but I have great hopes for them since the vines have lots of blooms. It just seems to be a later bean.
If you decide to grow your own pole beans, go for it. But one thing to remember: the first two or three beans you pick from each vine will not have full flavor. They will taste green and fresh, but the sweetness comes after those first few. Then the rest of the beans for the season will be wonderful.
A couple weeks ago I wondered if we would have many beans this year. As I mentioned in my last post, we are in a drought. It has gone from moderate to severe in the last couple weeks. The soybean fields are turning brown. I water a third of my garden each day, but the temperatures in the mid 90’s means things are drying even faster. In spite of that, the beans are now producing enough that we can eat some each day, and still put some in the freezer, or can as dill beans.
I look forward to the methodical hunting and picking of the beans in the bean tunnel. The vines are now taller than I am, and they make a nice shade to pick the beans in. I pick in mid-morning or early evening, after (or before) the dew, but before it gets really hot for the day. Then I take the beans to the comfy grown-up swing in the chicken yard. (Yes, I have a swing in the chicken yard.) It is the best place to sit in the summer. Shady, in the path of the prevailing breeze, with friendly hens all around. There are very few mosquitoes in the evening because the ducks eat them out of the air there. I snap off the small point on one end of the beans, and the blossom end on the other. If they have strings, or tough fibers that grow along the side of some green beans, then I pull those off too. The chickens enjoy eating the ends I snap off. I enjoy the half hour it takes to get a couple of gallons of beans ready, and the chickens enjoy the ends I drop.
The versatile bean is a large part of our diet. Fresh, we munch on the prettiest, fattest pods while we work outside, or I’ll julienne them raw and toss them with a vinaigrette for a tangy cold salad.
Cooked, it is a tasty green vegetable in the dead of winter, a savory side dish for holidays, a bright addition to stirfry and soup, and the mature bean seeds are a good source of protein in soups, dips, or baked. The plants themselves take nitrogen from the air, and make it available in the soil for other plants. They also store nitrogen in the nodes of their roots, which make even more nitrogen available, and improve the soils where they grew. The colors, shapes, and flavors mean that I could have a different variety of bean every day of the year, if I had the room to grow them all.