Baking bean recommendations

[jondear]

So I've been thinking I should try to grow more staples. We eat baked beans here, on average, every other week from October until April. Cold weather food season is upon us! There's nothing finer than to smell beans cooking all day, plus running the stove helps heat the house.

I usually cook pea beans, great northern beans or marfax. Yellow eyes are probably the most popular bean in the state, and I'll cook them from time to time, but I like to switch it up. Both pea and great northern beans are cheap $1 a pound, and I wonder if they are worth the effort. Marfax, are about 5 bucks a pound. I plan on a good planting of marfax, and a small trial of calypso this year but am willing to try a few more.

So those of you growing and baking beans, do you have a favorite variety that I should look for to grow a small trial of in the upcoming season?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

When I take single varieties of beans to the farmer's market, the most popular are red or pink kidney beans (for chili). Pinto beans are next most popular (for refried beans). Bean mixes are popular for putting in finger bowls or for decorating.

This week I was averaging about 4 pounds per hour picking and cleaning beans. We haven't had our fall frosts yet to kill the plants, so I was slowed down by having a mix of dry and green pods on the plants. I weeded the bean patch one time during the summer, and cultivated between rows one time.

Economically, it doesn't make sense to grow dry beans just for the sake of eating beans... A combine can pick more beans in a few seconds than I can in an hour. However, when I grow my own beans I can eat varieties that are not available anywhere else. And I know that poisons haven't been applied to my beans neither in the field, nor in storage. And I am denying the corporations and regulators a few cents that would otherwise be used against me.

[jondear]

From a purely economic standpoint, I totally agree. I sometimes feel like if I just worked at my job the hours I spend in my garden, I'd be further ahead if I bought all my vegetables. But I enjoy being able to grow and put food on my table.

I am a little prejudiced, I'm sure, but I think my veggies taste better than most of what I could buy. And like you say, I know how they were grown and when they were harvested, and what they were or were not sprayed with.

For me, at least, it makes sense to use legumes in rotation with my other crops to help with nitrogen requirements of the heavier feeders. I can only use so many snap beans and English peas, so dry beans make sense.

[ferdzy]

jondear, where are you? I've been trying beans from a few places the last few years and I've decided that starting with beans well adapted to your latitude will get you ahead of the game. Most of the southern beans I've tried have not done well for me.

The ones that have done best for me are Arikara Yellow, Deseronto Potato Bean, Dolloff, and Anseloni's Bologna bean. Beans from Maine or the Maritime Provinces generally do well. The common thread here is not so much climate, but day length. But if you are at a different latitude than I am, you best choice beans will almost certainly be different.

[jondear]

I am in Maine Ferdzy, so beans from Maine do have a certain appeal to me. There are some pretty obscure beans around, even if they are tough to get for seed. I've been looking for Maine sunset, and bumblebee for a while. I guess I should hit a few farmers markets this winter and look for some.

[steev]

I think the only non-mechanized way to harvest a substantial quantity of dry beans (enough to get one through the Winter, though not enough to finance a Winter in Florida) is to grow a large patch into maturity, pull and dry them, then thresh and winnow the beans. Picking pods is just too time-consuming for anything more than increasing seed until you amass enough to plant that patch.

[jondear]

My girlfriend would be willing to go to Fort Myers for the winter. Her brother lives there, and plants his garden on Thanksgiving.

This year for my Midnight Black Turtle beans, I cut the plant and whacked it into a 40 gallon tote. If I weren't anal about getting every last bean, it would have been pretty fast. After a quick winnowing I got almost 2 gallons of beans.

[steev]

There you go! Anal is only useful when you really NEED every last bean; if you got ~2 gallons of beans, you're past that, you lucky devil!

Thinking on this subject, I think when I have the house on the farm, heated with the wood-stove, I'm gonna run side-by-side trials of dry beans to actually get data on cooking time; won't be no big thing: just equal cans of pre-soaked beans, foil-topped, sitting on the stove all day, to see when they become edible. I think I've found a project, recording observations of different beans cooking characteristics. I might even determine a "standard" bean, against which others could be measured. Oh, Lord! I've resurrected my inner nerd!

[raymondo]

Beans I've tried and liked as baked beans (Cassoulet is what I make) include Coco Blanc Nain (Dwarf White Coco), Mandan Shield, Calypso, Molasses Face, Pinto and Purple King. I like the White Coco the best as it seems so substantial. Pintos, my number two choice, make a wonderful thick gravy without having to mash them. The others where all quite acceptable. In terms of production, Purple King is the winner in this lot though providing a trellis big enough might be an issue. The advantage of the bush types is that they can be sown wherever there's space.
This season I'll be growing Black Coco and Hutterite to try as baked beans.

[reed]

Oct 11, 2015 22:15:11 GMT -5 steev said:

I think the only non-mechanized way to harvest a substantial quantity of dry beans (enough to get one through the Winter, though not enough to finance a Winter in Florida) is to grow a large patch into maturity, pull and dry them, then thresh and winnow the beans. Picking pods is just too time-consuming for anything more than increasing seed until you amass enough to plant that patch.

If you plant pole beans on a slant so they hang down on one side and you don't have to look for em, it's easy to get more than enough for bean soup once a week for two all winter. With plenty left over each time for the chickens. That's after you have canned a bunch of green beans. I'v been experimenting with canning large beans as shellies with some tomato, garlic and hot pepper. Now I'm eating green beans once a week, bean soup once a week and chili once a week.  I like beans but do we really have to have them again tonight?

I store them in 2 liter pop bottles in a metal truck box outside on the porch. 

[12540dumont]

Bush or pole?

Bush: Beurre De Rocquencourt, Marché DeGeneviève, Hutterite Bush (Joseph's Paradise Bean Mix), Purgatorio, Gaucho, Ireland Creek Annie
Pole: Bada Bianco, New Mexican Bolito, Santa Anna, Good Mother Stollard, Petaluma Gold Rush, Speckled Cranberry, Rampicante Stegonta, Bologna, Borlotto di Vivegano...oh yes, I could go on.

Note I grow green beans, and when they dry, we use them as dry beans. All of the white colored beans make wonderful baked beans, For chili, I like a mix of kidneys, or in my case, this is where I use those Runner Beans.

And yes we eat beans once a week. Why grow your own? What if you went to the market and there were none? I think Beans, potatoes, onions, garlic are the best emergency food as well as everyday staples.

[jondear]

I've had fun looking up all those different bean varieties.

I'm leaning toward bush beans but haven't ruled out pole beans. My reasoning is if bad weather was coming, I could feasible bring in the bushes to dry under cover easier than unhooking a trellis and rolling up the whole mess.

I also ordered 1/2 a pound of Rockwell beans to try. I hope they're as good as they claim.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I inadvertently grow a lot of pole beans... I let the sprawl on the ground, or climb up any weed that is convenient. They are rambunctious, so it can be hard to keep varieties separate. Harvesting them was a pain this year, because we didn't get fall frosts to kill the vines, so they just kept growing and growing. I finally ended up pulling the vines just to get them harvested before snow-cover arrives.

Yesterday I was harvesting bush-ish beans by pulling plants, and hitting them against the inside of a garbage can. Two wacks was often sufficient. That was the best method I've found yet for harvesting lots of beans quickly. The first couple plants I was shattering beans as well as pods, but eventually I calibrated the force mostly right. And that avoided snipping off the dirty roots. Because I held the beans by the roots, outside the can.

[paquebot]

I wonder if I may be the only one who shucks a lot of beans and don't wear out my arthritic fingers. I can start with a 5-gallon pail of dry pods and have clean winnowed beans in 10 minutes. I use an electric hand mixer. First time I thought of it, figured that there would be a lot of broken beans but didn't happen. Works especially well with some varieties where the pods are tight. (Exceptions are scarlet runner and big lima types which are still by hand.) Right now I have somewhere around 30 gallons of dry beans and most threshed that way.

Martin

[steev]

I always wear my clippers, so cutting off roots is routine, so no soil; I drop it right there in the field, along with whatever root-nodule goodies there may be.

I may be re-thinking pulling the plants up, as opposed to clipping them off; not sure it makes a difference, given that I'll till the bed; sounds like less hand-work.