New Beans-Easy Harvest and Great Taste

September. The month when you swear that next year you will not grow so many beans (especially if you are the one picking them). If I were in charge of the world, bean retail prices would be a lot higher than they are now, especially for bush beans. The running joke is that farmers are the biggest whiners (ever heard the one about the wine cellar?), and for me and the subject of picking bush beans, that would be true.


Even now, when I am not picking much at all, I still whine-when we are planting bean trials (they take so much room!), when thinning and weeding (so much time!) and when evaluating and picking (who put so many varieties in this trial?!? Oh, right, me...).
And a bean is a bean is a bean, right? Nope!



This year, even I got pretty excited about picking beans, because a few of the beans in trial were so easy to pick!

When you are looking at twenty varieties in a trial, and 3-4 trials in a summer, there are sure to be some really nasty tasting beans. They may have been bred for processing, mechanical harvesting, or another climate all together. So wading through the dross, the varieties that shine really do (and I am always so grateful after eating too many flat tasting beans to find one that has a excellent flavor). Every year we seem to find one or two beans that are better than the ones we have been selling, or are an unique specialty items.

This year, we found a few truly excellent tasting beans that also were also really easy to pick.



One we already carry: Venice, a larger take on the French Fillet type, it is long and slender with great taste and no bean development even as it gets big.



Another is Lewis, which had such good flavor everyone in the office was going for those bags at the end of the day. This is your typical green bean size and shape.



A new bean that we had in a grower strip trial in Oregon, and also in our own trials, was Crockett. The pickers in Oregon liked the ease of harvest (and so did I, you could clean the whole plant in a few swipes, and get big handfuls of beans), and the taste is sweet and delicious. A dark shiny French Filet type.



We are looking into availability on a vigorous and beautiful green pole bean, and are keeping yield data as we pick all our pole beans every week.



One that we added last year continues to please this year: Golden Gate pole bean. The yield is so terrific that it is well worth the pricier seed. Big yellow buttery Roma pods that stay tender for fresh eating even at 10" long never go to waste.

Now, after being exposed to more bean varieties than any farmer would ever experiment with, I know exactly how I would grow beans: if land was not tight, I would grow varieties like Crockett that have one to two really concentrated sets, I would plant every 10 to 14 days. I would pick hard and move on to the next succession. If land was tight, I would grow the most prolific pole beans, and I would put in 3 successions. I would avoid harvesting off the same block of bush beans very many times- floppy beans, weedy beans, damaged beans, not enough beans on each plant, searching for beans within a rats nest of a plant...I would no longer have to whine about any of this. I might even become a bean-picking convert.