Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit

I mentioned a couple of posts back that I had decided to dry my beans. Why? Well, I'd originally planted them to eat them green, but after only a couple of times of that, I just fell behind and ended up with plants full of fat green beans at the end of the season. Once they get those full beans (the seeds) inside, they're no good for eating green anymore. I could have let them dry on the vine if we'd had nicer weather, but about that time it turned wet, and we had frost predicted on several occasions. Frost that never materialized and hasn't to date, but it meant bringing them in.

I went out and pulled all the bean plants and stripped them of their fat pods. I had four teepees of beans, with three stakes per teepee. Each stake had two plants, which means a total of 24 bean plants about 6' high. Took me a couple of hours to strip them all bare and pull out the stakes, pile up the vines and leaves for compost, and put all the beans into a bucket.

After I had all the bean pods inside, I used some heavy cotton sewing thread to stitch them all into 3' long strings, by simply running a needle and thread through the end of each bean. Once I had about 3', I tied the strings to the bottom of a sturdy coathanger, about 5 bundles per coathanger. Then I took them down to the woodstove and hung them from cracks behind the stove, against the brick, to dry out thoroughly.

A few days ago, my husband came to me with a handful of chocolatey brown beans and let me know that the pods were splitting open and dropping their beans everywhere. I interpreted that as, "Your stupid beans are getting everywhere, do something!" So tonight I took them all down, got a bucket, and shelled all the beans out. We ended up burning the dry pods, but I was thinking that they'd probably make good feed supplements for ruminants, if we'd had any.

After all that, I wound up with about 4 pints of beautiful brown beans. 4 pints. I figure it was about 2 hours each picking, stringing, and shelling, so over an hour to get a single pint of beans. *looking at large bag of beans picked up at Costco* Well, at least I know these are organic! Plus, drying them wasn't the original intent, it was just the result of wanting to save the last of the beans from going to waste. Now, we'll see how they actually taste...