Hey Debs! As stated before, I’ve had a fantastic bumper crop of beans this year! Take a look at it!
Check out dem beans!
Unless they’re picked at very early in the season for stirfrying, beans need to be shelled. This takes some time and practise. I had left the beans on the vine to dry so that I could get some good soup beans.
I’ve learned that unless you pull the strings out of the beans just right, the pod will fight you all the way and you end up with a pile of beans and a pile of tiny bits of ripped up pod as you massacre the pod just to get the beans out. This may also result in the occasional massacre of the bean as well. Do it right, however, and the pod will split perfectly into two halves, making it easy to get to the beans.
By the time I was done, I had two piles of beans. Not all of the beans ripened at the same time, so I divided them as I shelled them.
The beans divided
The most ripe beans went to the pile on the right, where they would be dried for next years seed. The unripe flagolet beans and the others that didn’t finish developing a thick skin were put on the left.
The seed beans were spaced roughly apart and placed on a towel to dry for several days.
From Right to Left: Australian Butter Beans, Rattlesnake Beans and Borlotti Beans
In a weeks’ time, they had shrunk and were ready for planting.
I only managed to save about ten of each bean, but that’s more than enough to plant out my field next year!
Seed beans are about half the size of freshly picked beans.
As for the rest, well, I cooked the youngest flagolet beans into a delicious chilli using my friend’s freshly dug up sweet potatoes. They were delicious!
I also saved some up for precooking and drying, but more on that later!
