Garden Planting my Favorite Shell Beans

Lima beans, horticultural beans, and blackeye peas are my favorite shell beans. I pick them when the beans inside have formed but are still soft and tender. They can grow to the dry stage, but if you let them do that, you’ll miss out on an early harvest and some very good eating.

Lima beans need 11 or 12 weeks of frost-free weather

To know the real taste of lima beans, you must eat them fresh from a home garden. There’s no comparison between fresh and store-bought. Succotash, that terrific blend of fresh corn, milk, butter, and limas, isn’t worth a hoot without fresh lima beans.

Jan and I use all the limas we can pick, so I plant them in blocks, wide rows, and in double rows. They yield a lot more than La single rows.

Bush limas are so bushy that I leave at least 3 feet between the rows and 6 or 8 inches between the seeds.

Limas are a little slow. Although they need warm soil and 11 or 12 weeks of frost-free weather, they still make sense for gardens in the North. If you have a short season, use seed protectant on your seeds and plant some before the average last frost date.

Pole limas take longer than bush limas, but they can be grown up North, too, especially if you plant the southern favorite Small Sieva. It’s a good variety which produces early.

Lima beans are ready to be harvested when the beans have formed inside the pods but before they get tough. The pods will look fat and lumpy when the limas are ready. You will find from two to five beans in each pod. If you blanch them for 2 minutes, they’ll be easier to shell.

French Horticultural and Vermont Cranberry beans

Besides lima beans, my favorite shelling beans are the French Horticultural bean and the Vermont Cranberry bean. We use them in succotash which we freeze, or can them. The Vermont Cranberry is the better canning bean. It keeps its flavor well and has a pleasing pinkish color. Jan puts up about a dozen pints of them each year.

Although the Vermont Cranberry has been known for many years as a New England favorite, people can grow it anywhere.

Much of the seed for this variety is grown in California.

Southern peas

Southern pea varieties such as Blackeye peas are not peas at all—they’re beans. I think they’re called “peas” because many of the beans are small and round.

When I travel in the South I often hear gardeners talk about them as “crowder” peas. They’re referring to southern pea varieties in which the peas are jammed together in the pod.

The name “cream” covers a lot of varieties, too; the cream peas I’ve seen have a smooth pod and small white peas.

Just because they’re called “southern” doesn’t mean they can’t be grown successfully in the North. All they need is warm soil and a fairly long growing season. If you can grow lima beans, you can grow all sorts of southern peas.

Southern peas are harvested as shell beans but can be allowed to dry. I have friends in Georgia who grow blocks of Blackeye peas to improve their soil. But before they till the plants back into the soil, they harvest the peas.

The Red Kidney is my favorite dry bean. I helped my dad and brothers harvest the beans, beginning when I was 5 years old. We gathered them late in the season when the plants were dead and brown and the beans were getting hard. My job was to pull up several plants in a bunch and lay them on the back of the wagon as we traveled across the field. We let the beans dry a little more in the barn before the family pitched in to thresh, winnow, and sort them.

When fully dried, beans are as hard as rocks. In fact, the way to test them is to bite down on a bean—carefully. If you can’t make a dent in it， the bean is about as dry as it’s ever going to get. Before the beans reach that stage, I pull up whole plants and set them against a fence post or hang them in the garage. You can hang them just about anywhere or even dry them on a floor in a spare room.

Thresh beans in a clean trash can

Threshing, or separating the dry beans from the pods and stalks, is easy and fun—especially with kids helping. One simple way is to whack the plants back and forth on the inside of a clean trash can. Or you can fill a burlap bag with dried bean plants and get the kids to walk or jump on the bag for a few minutes. Then shake the bag vigorously for another minute or so, open it up, and pull out the plants. Inside the bag will be the beans and bits of broken pods and stems known as chaff.

Separating the beans from the chaff is called winnowing. Wait for a windy day, then pour a basketful of your beans and chaff onto a blanket or canvas you’ve laid on the ground. Repeat this a few times and pretty soon all the chaff will have blown away, leaving only the beans. Then sort out any bad beans from the bunch—a job we used to do sitting around the kitchen table. We put the good beans in large glass jars, tightly capped them, and put them in a cool, dry place.

The other dry beans I like besides the Red Kidney (a super baking bean, by the way) are: Soldier, Navy, and Yellow Eye beans.

 

Soybeans

Soybeans need a long season to mature and dry on the vine. Most varieties take 100 days or so to mature. Fiskeby V is earlier and probably better suited to northern gardens, but I find the seeds too expensive to be worth the effort. Frostbeater is a better buy. Like limas, they are bushier than snap beans, so leave 6 or 7inches between plants in your rows. If you have a short season, harvest them when the beans inside have formed and are fairly soft.

To shell soybeans, dip the pods in boiling water for a few minutes and they’ll give up their beans more easily. With a long season you can let the soybeans dry on the vines, or you can pull out the plants and hang them up to dry. When they are quite hard, thresh and winnow them like other dry beans and store them in airtight containers.

Soybeans are a good green manure crop

Soybeans sprout quickly, grow lush like other beans, and add tremendous organic matter to the soil when you turn them under. I used to plant them in wide blocks for green manure. I tilled them in when they blossomed since I wasn’t interested in the harvest. I bought the inexpensive seed of common field varieties at the local grain and seed store.

If you have a long season and want to grow a green manure soybean crop to harvest before tilling it under, get a good table variety.

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