Beans, Beans, Beans

Last of the Pole Bean Plants

Cindy's Pole Beans did very well this year; she planted Blue Lake and Kentucky Wonder, and both varieties produced LOTS of delicious beans.

But the plants are done for the year and she pulled the vines out this week.  She decided to leave on the vines some of the pods that grew so large while she left me in charge of the garden for a couple of weeks this summer (see "The Three Foot Long Green Bean").

Dried Pods and Beans

There weren't any that were quite that long, but the longer pods tend to be tougher to eat, so she left some of them to dry out on the vines to provide seeds for next year's garden.

The pods were so dry they crackled like paper when we broke them open to remove the beans, and the beans themselves had a tendency to shoot across the table when the pods were opened.

Blue Lake and a few Kentucky Wonder Beans

The white beans are the Blue Lake and the brown ones are the Kentucky Wonder; the whole lot of them weighed in at a pound and a half of beans.

That seemed to me to be quite a lot of beans, more than the quantity it seems reasonable to assume you might want to plant in a relatively small garden, so I suspect there will be a recipe or two involving dried beans in the near future.

Or maybe we'll have bean soup sometime this winter.