[habitat_gardener]

I harvested 9 different pole beans from one of my gardens last week. Here's one day's harvest.

First column:
Cherokee Trail of Tears
Goose
Scarlet Runner Beans

Second column:
Sultan's Green Crescent
Purple Peacock
Emerite

Third column:
Bosnian
Jeminez
Mayflower

I like them all. I planted 6 seeds each of most of these beans (the ones I'm growing for the first time), except for Peacock and Sultan (12 seeds each, grew them last year) and Runner (came back from the root; planted the seed 2 years ago).

I usually try them raw first. In this bunch, the best is Purple Peacock, with a good crunch and sweetness. It's quite similar to Blue Coco, which I have growing at another garden. From 24 plants, I'm picking more than 100 Blue Coco beans every 2-3 days. Emerite is also ok, with kind of a grassy flavor and some sweetness. (And my favorite is La Vigneronne, which I usually eat only in the garden, but it's also sweet as a cooked bean.)

To cook them, I rinse them, boil a pot of water, and let them cook for a minute or two. Some of them are like Romano beans, in that the cooked beans become especially soft and tender and develop a whitish film (Sultan, Bosnian, Goose, and iirc Jeminez,). I eat those first. All the beans turn green when cooked.

Cherokee and Bosnian are very productive! I keep finding more beans, and the Cherokee vines are going all over the place. Emerite started out very productive, but it's already winding down. Jeminez and Peacock have the largest beans, so it doesn't take much to pick a big pile -- and they're the easiest to find because they aren't green!

The runner beans were the first to start producing, so I picked a lot of those at first. Once the other beans started producing, I stopped picking them, because I prefer the flavor of most other beans. Then I remembered how much I'd enjoyed eating dehydrated runner beans last year, so I'm picking them again and dehydrating a bunch, at different sizes. I will also let some go to seed and try them as shelly beans and dry beans.

I dehydrated some Emerite and Blue Coco, but they're not as good as runner beans dehydrated. Emerite dried to almost nothing. Blue Coco is ok, though, so I will dehydrate a quart jar of them. I've donated a bunch to the local food bank, brought some to my local garden group and a monthly produce share, and I'm eating a lot of beans every day!

I have beans growing at 3 gardens, and at the third garden, where I also planted 24 Blue Coco, production is winding down. I got no beans at all from one variety, a tiny handful from 2 more, and medium-size handfuls from the 2 varieties that normally produce huge harvests.

If I had to pick one bean I'd grow again from this group, first choice is Sultan's Green Crescent because it's such a wonderful cooked bean. I also grew it last year.

I may start letting some of these go to seed so I can try the dry beans, but I grow them mainly to use as snap beans.