The Bean Harvest

Last year I discovered the joy of Good Mother Stallard beans.  I bought a packet of seeds and grew one 15' long trellis.  They did nothing all summer, then at the end of August they started going nuts.  It turns out they're a cool weather bean that won't set beans in the heat.  When the nights begin to cool down the beans finally start to set.  You let them grow and mature to full, lumpy pods, and continue to let them hang there until they become dry and crispy.  At that point you pick 'em, shell 'em and store 'em.

So at the end of last year I had a good quart of pretty red and white beans.  I picked out a big handful of large beans for seed stock for this year, and the rest went into soup over the winter.  Those beans made the most incredible soup ever.  The flavor was superb to the point of being irresistible.  I resolved to increase my yield this year so I could have more of that incredible soup.

I planted a 10' row of beans in a row with the spring peas (which were still producing).  By the time the peas were done the beans were just climbing the strings and getting started.  I also planted a 30' row of Mammoth Russian sunflowers and put three or four bean seeds around each one.  The sunflowers went to 8' and when the heads matured I cut them off to dry to feed the chickens as a winter treat.  The beans went up the sunflower stalks and eventually outgrew them, leaving a huge mass of foliage at the top of the insufficient, dying stalks.

I tried to prop the whole thing up with some ropes, but the stalks became too weak and fell apart.  I had to resort to throwing the vines over the rope trellis I had laid out in hopes that some of the beans would mature.  Ultimately I cut the bean vines off at ground level and carried the whole tangled mass to the open shed for drying.  My long suffering wife and I picked the beans off those tangled vines and set the bean pods in the basement to dry some more.  After a week or two in the basement, with a little help from a cozy fire in the wood stove, the beans were dry enough to shell.  We spent two or three romantic evenings settin' and shellin' together.  It's amazing that marriage counselors don't recommend this as a means to a healthy marriage.

So our hard work is finally done.  Now we have a bowl of about 6 quarts of the prettiest beans you've ever seen.  Even taking out another big handful of seed stock for next year, we should have enough for plenty of tasty soup recipes for a chilly Pittsburgh winter.

 The beans on the left were also dried and shelled, but there's only a few cups of them, and I don't even know what they're called or if they're any good.  That's a story for another time.