Growing Real Green Beans

Barbara Pleasant

Freshly harvested, garden-grown green beans, or those purchased at your local farmers market, are wonderfully different from those you'd find at the supermarket ? fresh beans are subtly sweet with a crisp, yet tender, texture.

Green beans come in many shades of green, as well as yellow, purple and red. All are called 'green' beans because they are picked and eaten at an immature stage, before the seeds have ripened completely. Nutritionally, green beans are a good source of fiber, as well as vitamins A and K; the latter improves blood clotting and helps build strong bones.

Easy-to-grow green beans ask only for abundant sun, warm soil and ample moisture to produce well. And while you might think it's too late to grow your own crop this year, you can plant fast-growing beans eight to 10 weeks before your first fall frost. Most gardeners begin by choosing between compact bush-type varieties and pole beans, which grow long vines that require a trellis. As a general rule, a good bush variety will produce 5 to 6 pounds of beans per 10 foot row, but pole beans are more space-efficient, producing 8 to 9 pounds in the same amount of space. Pole types tend to produce beans for a longer period of time, too.

Round-podded Beans
Supermarket green beans, as well as most canned green beans, have round, fleshy pods with only the slightest hints of seeds inside. As long as you pick the beans when they're young, most of these modern bean varieties also are stringless. Exemplary stringless bush varieties include green-podded ?Blue Lake,' ?Maxibel' and ?Provider,' as well as ?Golden Wax' and many other yellow wax beans, plus ?Royal Burgundy,' which bears purple pods.

If you want a round-podded pole bean, ?Kentucky Blue' and ?Fortex' are good bets. These and other round-podded beans are the best types for eating raw, or you can blanch them by plunging the beans into boiling water for 30 seconds, then cooling them in ice water ? a process that stabilizes their vitamins and color.

Flat-podded Beans
The most famous of all flat-podded beans is ?Romano,' an Italian heirloom pole bean that has now been bred into bush forms including ?Roma II' and ?Gina' (green pods) and ?Romano Gold' (yellow pods). The majority of flat-podded green beans are pole beans, including heavy-bearing ?Kwintus' and many others. Seed catalogs often describe these varieties as stringless, but most of them do develop strings as the pods begin to mature. Their flavor and texture changes too ? often for the better ? so these beans can be taken in two different directions in the kitchen. You can pick very young pods and handle them like round-podded beans, or let them hang on the vine until the seeds begin to bump up.

Early American Beans
Columbus and other early explorers found Native Americans planting beans in their corn gardens (where the corn stalks acted as natural trellises), and many older, shade-tolerant, long-vining bean varieties are still available from companies that sell heirloom seeds. These early American beans are picked when the pods are full with immature beans. Stringing the beans is a mandatory step in their preparation.

SEED SOURCES:

Park Seed Co.
1 Parkton Ave.
Greenwood, SC 29647
(800) 213-0076
www.parkseed.com

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
P.O. Box 460
Mineral, VA 23117
(540) 894-9480
www.southernexposure.com

Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center
1033 Pilot Knob Cemetery Road
Berea, KY 40403
(859) 986-3204
www.heirlooms.org

Territorial Seed Co.
P.O. Box 158
Cottage Grove, OR 97424
(800) 626-0866
www.territorial-seed.com

Vermont Bean Seed Co.
334 West Stroud St.
Randolph, WI 53956
(800) 349-1071
www.vermontbean.com

Victory Seeds
P.O. Box 192
Molalla, OR 97038
(503) 829-3126
www.victoryseeds.com