It's bean a while...

…since I last wrote my blog. Suffice to say I have moved house twice, and now a year later, new gardens are dug, the compost bins are all lined up in a row like little daleks…and the botanical adventures continue. Today's blog is about beans.

The first time I encountered soybean plants growing, I had no idea what I was looking at. They were potted up in a greenhouse at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Centre in St Louis, Missouri. Soybeans  are so common in the US the plant scientist must have wondered what planet I'd grown up on, but in all fairness they are not commonly grown in New Zealand. 

Soybeans ready for picking at the green-stage.

Five years later, I tried some Edamame beans cooked in the pod at a Japanese restaurant in Parnell, Auckland. They were so delicious that when I spotted some seeds in the Kings Seeds catalogue, I decided I'd have a go at growing them myself.  I put them in the greenhouse because I wasn't sure how they'd go in a cool-temperate climate, and they went very well indeed. The leaves were intensely desirable to caterpillars, however, with infestations of the dastardly creatures reducing the leaves to mere veins. No wonder commercial bean crops are either heavily sprayed with pesticides or genetically modified with a Bt toxin to stop these critters. In my small patch, squeezing caterpillars between my fingers worked well! I harvested a few beans at the fresh shell-stage, as shown in the picture above, which my work colleague assured me was the right stage to eat them green (as edamame). At this stage, they're often called butterbeans, and they are harvested just as the pods begin to lose their bright green colour. I was surprised by the volume of beans I got from a dozen plants. I tried cooking them in the pods, but the pods were hairy and tough. I’m not sure how that Japanese restaurant prepared them in this way.

They were quite delicious shelled green and cooked for five minutes or until tender. I froze a couple of small bags of them to use later in the year. Very nice added to stir fries or to dishes where you’d normally use peas or other beans, like broad beans. The most time consuming thing was shelling them - they are a lot more fiddly than peas, but then I did find a website which recommends steaming them in their pods for a few minutes, leaving them to cool, podding them and then re-cooking them.

If you  want to save the seeds, or store the beans to eat later, you need to leave the beans to mature further and dry in the pods. But then they need to be soaked and cooked a lot longer. 

 

They are very high in complete protein and provide lots of the essential amino acids and I’m quite happy to grow them again. I’m going to try growing them outside this year.

Buoyed by my beans experience, I’ve volunteered myself for a project being run by the Central Tree Crops Research Trust in Whanganui "Adopt an Ancient Bean”. The project aims to enlist New Zealander's to grow 29 ancient varieties of beans sourced from heirloom seed organisations across the USA. An American seed saving group have been growing the beans to meet the phytosanitary import requirements of New Zealand. The varieties which have been selected include some ancient and beautiful North American Indian varieties (Hopi), some traditional Mexican varieties, as well as some early American Settler varieties. I'll let you know if they pick me to grow a variety and update progress :)