2025 Little Easy Bean Network - Growers Of The Future Will Be Glad We Saved

[Blue-Jay]

hello! I have just joined up after reading through this and the 2024 bean thread. I will be growing out a couple of beans too. It is great to see some familiar names here and there from the Gardenweb and other forums back in the day. I think maybe Tomatoville too. Cheers, Susanne.

Welcome SusanneinHastings,

So nice to see you made it over here. I think you will enjoy this group of bean growers. You will feel like you gained another family.

 

[SusanneinHastings]

This is Hastings, Minnesota, USA on the Mississippi River, a little south of St Paul. Not named after the famous Hastings of 1066 but supposedly one of the many places named after Henry Hastings Sibley, who was the first state governor. I was poking around trying to find how to put my location in my profile but haven’t found it yet.

The soil temperature is 50 F (10C) now and we just got missed by the big storm yesterday, so I can hear all the farmers out with their machinery, prepping the fields for corn. I am out on the deck transplanting a million bazillion tomato seedlings for the master gardener sale in a couple of weeks.

I will be growing out Andikove soldier pole bean and Frost bean from Russ’ collection, hopefully to use at some point for the historical site I work at. But this year I am growing them in my garden, to keep them safe from the many critters at the site. Along with some other beans new to me: a tarbais bean, a Swedish brown bean, and some true red cranberry and corn hill beans for the site. Also gigantes which are a Greek Lima bean that I am very fond of, but is expensive and hard to get here. I don’t know whether we have a long enough season for that, so we will see.

At the site we have a Three Sisters garden, and I will be putting in Hidatsa beans, blue Shackamaxon, and some corn hill beans from a swap this spring. And in the regimental garden this year, just some cheap green beans and navy beans, because the nearest building is closed this year, so we might not have enough foot traffic back there to keep the wild turkeys out of the garden.

I am trying to find more about what type of dry beans they could have gotten for the army rations in the 1820s, or whether just peas would have been available. The army guaranteed a certain amount of either dry peas or beans, so that suggests that sometimes the army could buy beans. One of the cookbooks we use (Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery 1796) mentions Frost Bean and “Crambury bean” among others, and I found a reference to soldier beans being fairly common in the U.S. before 1800, so that’s why I thought I would start with those. I can post her whole bean list if there is interest.