Beans
I’m definitely full of beans about the bean based experiments this year. Not so much the varieties, not so much the bean pole construction ideas.. but the sunflower based living beanpole plan! Mmmwahaha.
Ok, to start with I’ve chosen a few different bean varieties:
Pole Beans – “Cherokee Trail of Tears”
These are really interesting, from Real Seeds. They have a great history and are a brilliant buy from Real Seeds, perfect example of why I love what they do. I grew these last year on really bad, unprepared, recently de-turfed, heavy clay soil. When I say clay soil, I mean literally there is vein of pure clay running under that area you can build pots out of. I started digging it at the end of last year and a took out huge clumps of pure clay, enough to fill the wheelbarrow. One of these days I’ll make and fire a pot of out it, just to prove the point. The beans germinated really well inside, but appeared to grow really really slowly when planted out at first. Eventually they started climbing and did well after that. It was a pretty crappy summer too. The beans I got were ok as green beans, but what I liked more was when left to ripen you end up with black shiny kidney style beans inside. These I collected and really enjoyed cooking with them. Cooking the black beans turn the water black! They had a really great taste too. I’m growing them again this year mainly for the black beans, but I have a plan for these in the sunflower beanpole experiment!
Italian Climbing Bean – “Marvel of Venice”
Unusual Italian climbing bean that reaches a height of 9ft/3metres, producing huge crops of wide, meaty 25cm long yellow string-less beans that have a very tender, almost buttery flesh, with absolutely no strings
The certainly sound interesting. Its an experiment in themselves to see what the hell they are when the grow and if they are anything like their description.
Yellow Runner Beans – bought in Poland
We also have some runner beans that are also yellow in colour that we bought in Poland. I wanted to grow some runner beans too, just thought it would make an interesting twist having them yellow.
I need to think about if I have enough beans for my planned area. Two yellow beans might need a second green to balance out, but again the interesting thing here will be the chance of cross pollination. I believe there may be a big chance of it and I definitely will be growing these within range!
The two other bean realated experiments are the Bean Pole Construction and the Sunflower Living Bean Pole experiment.
