Phoenix Bird

SAVING SEEDS - BEANS & PEAS

By: Ron
The One Who Walks Two Paths

Nothing is better than a big old pot of freshly picked green beans cooked with a couple of nice onions you picked on the way in from the garden. Throw in a double handful of new baby red potatoes ...mmmmm... now that is a side dish you can eat all by itself.

Beans:
You have lima beans, green and wax beans, and dry beans like kidneys and pintos. One of the things I think is the biggest scam is that bean inoculate you see in the catalogs. It's the kind that inoculates the soil with microorganisms to help nourish the seedling and help nitrify the soil. Want a natural way to do that? Use compost! Dig your furrow and back-fill with half fresh (meaning freshly finished compost ) compost and you've just inoculated your soil.

Now one of the things I do is to choose one of the fifty foot rows of beans and harvest them only once. I do this to encourage the plant to set more seed. After harvesting once I sit back and wait until the pods fill out and start to dry - you know, the point when the flesh of the beans starts to yellow and become real thin. At this point I pick them; the seed is full formed by this point and just needs to finish drying. I do this for two reasons. One, it fools the plant into thinking it needs to set more seed and two, I don't loose any seed when the pod dries and splits open. I then remove the seed from the pod and spread it out on a window screen in a warm place to dry for several weeks. You want the seed to be truly hard, crunchy hard.

The only difference is the way I treat beans that stay dry, like kidney and the like. I don't pick the first harvest then keep picking them when the flesh turns yellow and becomes papery thin, at the point before it dries up. Peas are treated the same way I do beans. Harvest them for a while and leave the last picking on the vine to mature

BACK