2022 Little Easy Bean Network - We Are Beans Without Borders

[Pulsegleaner]

Favas are a sort of interesting crop, as they appear to be the sort of flipside to most of the transatlantic crop movement of the 15-1600's. While a lot of New World crops were entering the European diet (maize, common beans, squash pumpkins, potatoes etc.), favas were being brough back the other way and entering the New World diets, especially in Peru (to the point where I now think there are probably more varieties of Fava bean to be found in South America than there still are around Europe.)

 

[jbosmith]

That said, it is easy to harvest a dry crop of favas in the British climate, but they're almost exclusively eaten green.
We export tonnes to the Middle East, but we have no culture outselves of eating them dry. Whereas in the Netherlands, with a similar climate to the UK, there is a long standing tradition of eating dry favas and dry Phaseolus.
We used to also eat dry peas, hundreds of years ago, but that died out almost entirely. So there may be more to it than just weather/ability to dry produce.
This has very recently changed on a microscale - there are small producers marketing British dried pulses as the demand for locally-grown plant protein increases.

It's is so weird when culture meets agriculture. Soy is one of the biggest crops in the US but there's very limited information for processing it at home, other than a few sites about edamame. Same with flour/dent corn.

 

[heirloomgal]

It's is so weird when culture meets agriculture. Soy is one of the biggest crops in the US but there's very limited information for processing it at home, other than a few sites about edamame. Same with flour/dent corn.

I agree jb; when I learned just how much beans we export here I couldn't believe it. Usually countries develop cuisines based on what grows well there. Not so it appears in North America.

@meadow this is just a thought, but in terms of beans that do better in moister environments, I wonder if looking at it from the pod angle might be helpful. I noticed this year that some pod types are much more likely to get mouldy than others. Hard podded beans seem to resist water much better. Thin shelled beans don't seem to do so well. The crescent shaped pod varieties do very well too I find.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Recently, a friend of mine from England brought me a large packet of beans from the US and Canada. I was supposed to receive them in mid-May, but for various reasons I received them only now. I can say that I ended the old bean hunting season and started a new one at the same time,

Nice to see that your bean package made it from the U.S. Something to look forward to planting in 2023.

 

[Blue-Jay]

How Red Can A Jeminez Pod Get. Found these today and just had to take the picture. Found some new little pods the plants had grown and munched on two of them. Delicious stringless suculent pods. I got about seven more I'm going to try steam cooking them tomorrow.

 

[flowerbug]

It's is so weird when culture meets agriculture. Soy is one of the biggest crops in the US but there's very limited information for processing it at home, other than a few sites about edamame. Same with flour/dent corn.

what do you mean by processing?

 

[heirloomgal]

Little miracle. Network bean Georgian Black & White has been drying down out of the ground. I had to pull it out at a pretty iffy moment since the pods were still all rather green. I got one pod awhile ago, which was a relief since I have no seeds left and this meant I could try again. But today, to my surprise I found more dried pods. I was expecting poor quality from whatever I got because they were pulled so early, but they aren't bad. Holy mackerel, this drying down out of ground stuff really works!

Blue Ribbon bush bean. The only Romano bean I know of whose fresh pod is green splashed with purple. I haven't grown this bean in so long I had forgotten what it looked like fresh.

Dragon Tongue bush bean. Fresh pods are yellow splashed with purple.

Meuch (pole) pods are ready to be shelled. Thank goodness! I wondered how they'd do.The pods are actually darker than the photo shows. Blackish purple.

It's been an unusually clean bush bean year. I didn't space these Schwarze Dalmatins as far apart as I did my network bush beans, and still they stayed pretty clean. I'm shocked! Maybe this bean has a higher concentration of antibiotics than others do.

 

[meadow]

I agree jb; when I learned just how much beans we export here I couldn't believe it. Usually countries develop cuisines based on what grows well there. Not so it appears in North America.

@meadow this is just a thought, but in terms of beans that do better in moister environments, I wonder if looking at it from the pod angle might be helpful. I noticed this year that some pod types are much more likely to get mouldy than others. Hard podded beans seem to resist water much better. Thin shelled beans don't seem to do so well. The crescent shaped pod varieties do very well too I find.

DD works at a food bank and they do not accept donations of dried beans because they cannot even give them away.

Interesting thought on the pod types.

 

[Decoy1]

i think these things are factors, but if the UK is generally cooler and damp then a dry bean harvest is not easy to accomplish without some dedication (aka labor). fresh green or wax beans are a different story entirely.

my own experience with growing beans in a somewhat non-optimal area has shown that it is possible but not always easy.

Growing up as I did in the middle section of the last century, I had a father who grew no vegetables at all apart from ‘runner’ beans - P. coccineus. They were his pride and joy and we lived off them through late summer and into autumn.

The climate in the midlands of England suited them very well. I don’t remember them ever being watered. I don’t think I ever had a fava bean as a child, and P. vulgaris as a green bean would have been a rarity.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Little miracle. Network bean Georgian Black & White has been drying down out of the ground. I had to pull it out at a pretty iffy moment since the pods were still all rather green.

Glad you mentioned this @heirloomgal. This idea of harvesting green pods is the other item I was going to post for @meadow as she asked if I had anymore gardening tricks for her in regard to dry bean seed. So if you are in the part of your season where you are now going to get freezing temperatures almost every single night because you had a late planting or the variety just simply matures later than your season allows. So your tempeartures will likely be cold enough to destroy seed that still has a high moisture content. Well if your bean pods have become swollen with seed and if they are still as green as a snap bean and you know the pods have been full of seed for awhile. Go ahead and harvest them green. I am doing just that this past few days because we are going to have a freeze cold enough to destroy any seed that hasn't been harvest yet and has high moisture content. Dry your green pods indoors. Spread them out on something. I use sheets of cardboard. They might take a month but you will get nice looking seed that grows. Below is the photo of Gila River that I thought I had forgotten to plant and have not had a single dry pod or even a yellow pod. I harvested these this past Monday October 3, 2022. They have lightened up a bit in the last three days. Some pods look like they are even starting to yellow. Yesterday I harvested Rio Zape pods that were as green as a snap bean, but I know they have been swollen with seed for a fairly good while now. In fact I have never harvested a dry Rio Zape or even yellow pod of this variety since I've grown it from time to time in the last 10 years.

Gila River

My experince with harvesting green pods swollen with seed and finding out how early the seed inside has the ability to grow into another bean plant came in September 1978. I was growing a bunch of varieties I had gotten from John Withee's Wanigan bean network. Starting in the last few days of August we started getting almost nearly nightly rains that would last for about a month. There were stretches of time where we got nightly rains and sometimes another shower in the daytime. Little did I know at the time but that September would wind up giving us about 12 inches of rain. I had harvested a small amount of dry pods but the bulk of my pods were still green and hard as a snap bean pod. I was working in an auto plant night shift and every evening I could hear the thunder. I knew we were once again getting rain. Those green pods were being kept so constantly wet that one day I saw some of them with bean sprout roots sticking out of the entire length of the pod. Something I have never forgotten and have put that piece of knowledge to work many times.