Experimental beans
We
went a little overboard with experimental beans this year, and now
we're starting to get an idea of which ones like our garden.
First of all, I should note that our old standby Masai Beans are still
plugging right along. We already have a
gallon of delicious green beans in the freezer, with many more to
come as my later-planted beds start to bear. Masai Beans
are really the best green beans I've ever tasted, and they're
stringless, so preparation is a breeze. Plus, you can save the
seeds --- we haven't bought green bean seeds in three years.
On the experimental
side, a friend of mine mailed me a few of her favorite dried
beans to play with --- Yellow Indian (pictured above), Allubia Criolla,
and Cayamento
Cranberry. My goal here is to find a dried bean that will capture
even Mark's interest, and I'm willing to try as many varieties as it
takes to reach that point. Currently, the pole beans are happily
running up their trellis, blooming like crazy, and setting big
pods. I won't really have information for you, though, until we
run a taste test.
Our
garbanzo beans are less happy. I planted Black Karbouli Bush
Garbanzo at the end of April, but later learned that garbanzos like
cool weather and should be planted at the same time as the peas.
No wonder a
third of my plants dried up and the rest have luxuriant foliage but no
signs of blooms. Even if we get nothing out of this experimental
bed, I'll try the garbanzos again next spring, planting in a more
proper time frame to see what develops.
We
also planted Urd Beans (for sprouting) and some Endamame Soybeans
(for endamame). The two types of beans seemed
happy as little clams...until the deer came in and ate them. We
had a few minor deer incursions this summer when deterrents went
down, and our four-legged f(r)iends seem
quite partial to my experimental crops. So, just like with our
garbanzos, if we fail to get a crop this year, I won't despair.
Now that we've done
everything wrong that we possibly can with beans, I'm hoping next year
will be a stunning success. For the sake of comparison, oilseed
sunflowers were one
of our big experiments last year, so the deer ate them down to the
ground. This year, the sunflowers were no longer experimental, so
the deer left them alone and the plants are now towering over my
head. Clearly, there is a moral here, if I can only figure it
out. Maybe the deer are bored by my experiments posts?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Have you figured out how the deer are getting on the internet and reading your blog in the first place? If you could keep them from learning which plantings are experimental, that could help your problem!
At any rate, please don't quit posting about your experiments just to head off the deer - your experiments give me plenty of ideas for for experiments of my own in our garden!
It's clearly the wireless access we have running to the yurt....
I'm glad you enjoy our experiments posts, even when they consist of repetitions of "Nope, that didn't work."