The garden is winding down and frankly looking a bit pitiful at this point. We are beginning to shell out the pole beans I left to dry for seed saving. My always eager to help toddler joined me on this as he loved stomping on the bag of dried beans to help break open the pods.
I leave the pods on the vine until they are very crunchy, not leathery anymore. I have read that this allows the bean to really absorb all of the plant nutrients available to it before hibernating as a seed. Of course you can always dry out the bean and then re-hydrate as you would soak beans for soups too, If I have an abundance more than what I will plant next year I may try this too.
This particular crop is kind of special as we did not harvest it for green bean eating this year but rather left the entire row alone for seed saving. This is because my husband's grandmother has helped save and has passed this particular bean down now through 3 generations and it is an old heirloom variety that though she cannot recall the name of she swears you cannot find any longer. Anyway, hubby likes the taste so we put out a crop of the last of the seeds to garner more seeds as grandma was out of seeds too. It seems the last 2-3 years has not been good for this bean and the seed was fast becoming unavailable to us as grandma had no more to share for next year's planting either.
After stomping on the bag of bean pods we shelled what was not already broken open and freed the seeds. (He thought this was quite fun!)
This particular crop is kind of special as we did not harvest it for green bean eating this year but rather left the entire row alone for seed saving. This is because my husband's grandmother has helped save and has passed this particular bean down now through 3 generations and it is an old heirloom variety that though she cannot recall the name of she swears you cannot find any longer. Anyway, hubby likes the taste so we put out a crop of the last of the seeds to garner more seeds as grandma was out of seeds too. It seems the last 2-3 years has not been good for this bean and the seed was fast becoming unavailable to us as grandma had no more to share for next year's planting either.
After stomping on the bag of bean pods we shelled what was not already broken open and freed the seeds. (He thought this was quite fun!)
Here is the start of our beans, we ended up with around 3 cups of beans, those will dry out on a cookie sheet for a week or so more until the beans themselves are rock hard. Then I will store them in a ziplock or other airtight container until next year's planting.
