Jack and the Bean Stalk

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

We’ve recently been talking about local sources for dried beans, but don’t overlook the fact that you can grow your very own dried beans in a very small amount of space.  In my case, I didn’t quite mean to grow dried beans - I just didn’t have time to keep up with the beans in my garden and they became dried beans.  As you might be able to see, the limas, green beans, and purple beans overgrew, dried up, and left me with a couple fistfuls of beans.  And there would have been many more had I completely ignored my little plot of beans instead of only doing a half-assed job of keeping them picked!

You can plant regular old beans and just let them get out of hand, like I did.  But there are quite a few varieties of beans that are intended for use as dried beans.  Victory Seeds has a nice selection of heirloom varieties, but you can get them from nearly any seed company.  And it’s a good, low maintenance thing to plant in the garden - simply plant, keep watered, and don’t harvest until the end of the season when the seed pods have dried up on the vine.