A Garden Surprise: Red Beans and Black Beans

     I love beans and eat a lot of them (except on Jam Night, when they might cause me embarrassment).  I try to eat beans one or two times every week.  And while I do like to eat them so much, I never had much luck growing them in the garden, except for green beans and scarlet runners.  Here in the Robson Valley we don’t really have a climate that is very suitable for growing beans.

    Beans like a long growing season with heat and sun, and unfortunately our growing season is not that long and has cooler temperatures.  Spring warmth is often slow getting to us, and frost can unexpected hit us in just about any month.  (I remember getting a killing frost in August one year.)    I sometimes even have trouble growing green beans because often it is just too wet and the bean pods get moldy.  The few times I have tried growing other types of beans, they failed.

    Last spring, my wife spent a day helping the Community Garden distribute free seeds from our library’s Seed Exchange.  She brought home a small packet of red beans and one of black beans for me to plant.  Given my past experience with beans, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about planting them, but I did.

    This summer we experienced a long growing season with warmish weather that continued through September and into October.  When I did see that a frost was coming, I picked the bean pods from the plants and brought them into the house.  I didn’t bother opening the pods, so I didn’t really know if I had gotten anything useable.  You saw a photo of the bean pods that I was storing, yesterday in the blog.

    After blogging about them, I was curious to open them to see if I had gotten anything, and “Wow!”  I was surprised to see that I gotten a useable crop of both the red beans and the black beans.

    Both red beans and black beans remind me of past travels.  In Hong Kong, I was surprised to find that in McDonald’s, they featured a dessert made from red beans.  In travels in Mexico, it seemed that whatever we ordered, we got a plate with black beans hidden somewhere on it.  I love them both, so I am overjoyed at being able to have grown my own this year.

    I will save some of the beans for seed, some for the library’s seed exchange, and some for myself to plant in the garden again next year.  The rest will end up in soup.

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