In addition to flowers, shapes, colors, and scents, Mother Nature created beans! The variety of colors, sizes, and tastes seem as diverse as types of leaves on trees.

This season provided a new experience with the beans in my garden: critters ate the string bean baby plants but did not touch the drying bean types. Go figure! It could be that drying bean species have tougher and/or textured pods. Maybe that is an adaptation by the bean plants over millennium to avoid predation.

Shown are (from the top left): Scarlet Runner – purple and black striated, Colorado River –  sandy and magenta, Rattlesnake pole string bean – gray with striations, Blue Lake green string bean -white, Cranberry bean – cream with magenta or magenta with cream. Climbing Sweet Snap Peas are to the bottom left. Not pictured is Purple Bush string bean.

The Scarlet Runners and Colorado River beans were drying bean experiments this year. Scarlet Runner is a climbing bean requiring a trellis of some sort and Colorado River Bean is a small bush variety, growing not more than 9 inches tall. It also is fairly drought tolerant.

Both were grown to see how they would perform at altitude and with the climate changes that we are experiencing here: more intense heat, solar gain, and long dry spells. Irrigation supplants the missing rain but is no replacement. I was very pleased with the growing results but have not tasted (cooked) either. The vast majority of the resulting seeds will be kept for growing next year; thus growing from acclimated seed stock.

Gardening gives one great appreciation for where food comes from and what factually is  entailed in producing the food one eats. For example, approximately 25 Scarlet Runner plants climbing effortlessly up their strings produced just less than one pint jar of dried beans. That probably equals 2 sixteen ounce cans at the store. So, what is so easily reached for on a store shelf has required an amazing amount of land, soil, water, labor, and proper processing. And, if grown organically so that the soil is replenished properly with each season’s yield, wow, a lot of effort has gone into those beans. So, paying reasonable money for healthy food obtained conveniently becomes more appreciated as backyard gardens supply each of us with what they do. One will never complain about too many zucchini again!

This was the second season of growing Cranberry Beans which taste similar to a Pinto bean. They also are a bush, low plant variety. I highly recommend planting bush variety (string or drying) as borders or along walkways and such. Pollinators love bean flowers! All bean plants produce food for you as well as pollinators be they insect including moths and butterflies or hummingbirds. All beans can be grown in containers; provide a trellis or cage as necessary. All beans are nitrogen fixers, thus benefitting the soil.

I hope you will play with beans in your garden or along your walkways next season!