Allow us a moment to wax (wax bean?) poetic about one of our favorite tastes of summer.
Garden fresh beans. What’s not to love? Stir-fried, sauted, fresh, roasted, pickled– there’s no way to do them wrong. Then why does the English language cast these tasty morsels in such a bad light? Being “full of beans“ or never amounting to “a hill of beans” aren’t exactly compliments. Getting “beaned” in baseball is nobody’s definition of a good time. And calling someone a “bean counter” can be downright rude. Why the bad vibes, people? Maybe our language-creating ancestors only ate beans from aluminum cans. Literal food for thought… But I digress. Back to regular programming—- Garden fresh beans!
Did you know that there are different beans for different uses? To the culinistas (did we just invent a word??) out there, you may want to take some notes. Our catalog has a bean for every occasion:
Snap Bush Beans – These produce concentrated harvests of juicy beans for fresh-eating, sautéing, freezing or canning. An early May sowing will give you 3-4 weeks of picking starting in July. If you want continued harvests through August and September, consider sowing second and even third successions in June and July. Provider and Buerre de Roquencourt are our earliest-to-mature varieties while the fancy French filet bean, Velour, needs 1-2 more weeks to set fruit. For those of you who are all about flavor, Lewis bush bean won our on-farm bush bean taste test- TWICE!
Snap Pole Beans – Pole beans are the quintessential garden crop. While they lack the speediness of bush beans they make up for it in prolonged yields all summer long. Be sure to give them something to grab onto and climb up before they send out their vines. A back fence, bamboo stakes or twine draped from a trellis all work just fine. Kew Blue produces stunning semi-flat deep purple crunchy delights and Cobra’s green beans are the tastiest and earliest maturing pole beans we’ve found! Use ’em in any which way.
Dry Beans (Bush or Pole, but all our varieties are Bush) – These morsels are intended for a late summer harvest, after the plants have dried down and the beans are brown and crispy. Our Rockwells are a Slow Food “Ark of Taste” variety, renowned for its delectability as a baked bean. Dragon Langerie is juicy and tender for eating fresh and can also be dried or shelled.