#dry beans

I ended up with a lot of mixed-food jars, with a lot of dry beans misplaced in there, so today I figured I would take it all apart, sort the dried food, and make a record of how much beans I managed to grow in a fairly small growing area.

I did it on my bed as usual, and it was a lot of fun sorting it all out! You can see dried tomatoes, kohlrabi, carrots, zucchini, parsnip, and a whole lot of bean varieties.

My absolute favourite were these little purple beans, they're soo beautiful. I can't figure out where I got these, but I will grow more of this. I also liked to see all these different piles of beans, that is a great storage food to grow!

Now, for the research part. Do you see these two biggest piles of beans, green and brown ones? This is what I wanted to compare, because I intentionally planted a very similar amounts of these, but the brown ones are a tall (pole) variety, and the green ones a short (bush) variety. Generally short varieties give out less produce, yet in the piles, you can see there is more of the green ones!

I also went out of my way to create a hand-made scale (here's a link to how that's done), to see the difference in weight, and found I had 216g of the brown beans, and 235g of the green ones. So I definitely grew more of the green ones, despite them being a less productive variety.

I don't think this is proof that the green ones did magically better; they just did it faster. Short growing varieties create produce earlier, I was picking up short-variety beans before the tall variety even formed the pods. This also means they were less affected by the drought and the heat waves; in fact, they were done before the worst part even arrived. A lot of the tall-growing bean pods ended up failing due to the heat and the lack of water, so they would have produced more if the year was any better.

This is a really good piece of knowledge to have! If you plant bush-variety beans, you're much safer to actually get the harvest despite bad weather conditions, but it's still good to plant the pole variety, because if the weather is good, they'll give you more beans! I'll plant all of these varieties again.

My last task was to pick the best, biggest and shiniest beans from every variety, and I packed them into my seed packages, to plant in the spring. I'm looking forward to eating all these dried foods, I haven't actually tested most of these in recipes, I was only thinking of storage. I'll report my cooking results too!

This part is mostly close ups of some of the plants

Jalapeno in the dirt row with some Armanian blossoms

I honestly cannot remember what this pepper is and I can't find the label we had put next to it when planted. I know it's a spicy pepper and could possibly be an Anaheim. So far this is the best producing of all peppers planted.

If I remember right this is the Tabasco pepper I bought and planted, I am hoping to get enough to grow my own next year but would buy again just at an earlier point in the grow season.

Our mystery pepper getting back to buisness

The dry bean variety I had mention in pt 1 for this update.

Dragon fruit and Aloe plants

Pomegranate tree, still no pomegranates... I'm beginning to worry we have a variety that doesn't produce fruits

Cowpeas