We love fresh green beans.
And we love fresh green beans that aren't green but are sort of a pasty pale greenish white with purple stripes.
It makes for a nice change.
I grow our beans from seed. It's one of the few veggies that I plant from seed that I never stress out over.
That's rare.
It's hard for me to grow things from seed. You have to baby seeds. I hate babying seeds. You have to make sure they're at just the right temperature and watered just so. I don't even make sure that I'M the right temperature and watered just so. Seeds and me have a rocky relationship.
But beans I shove into the ground, salute and walk away from and in a few weeks I have food.
It's awesome.
This year we grew two kinds of bush beans: Blue Lake Bush and Dragon Tongue Bush. I'll let you guess which ones are which in the photo above.
I love bush beans because they stay short. I don't have to build structures to support them and then take those structures down at the end of the season. All I have to do is pick the beans. I love that.The Blue Lake beans are great beans. They're reasonably bug and disease resistant. They're great producers. They have a beautiful white flower and smooth green flesh.
No need to string them, just snap the stem end off and they're delicious.
These beans are my favorite beans to use for Dilly Beans. They stay quite firm and have a bit of crunch and I like that in a dill pickle.
The dragon tongue beans are a whole different experience. They have pink flowers.
This, of course, makes them far superior to every other bean on the planet. Just ask K2.
Dragon tongues are flat and have a rougher texture than regular green beans, but they are delicious! We like them sauteed with garlic and olive oil. It's too bad that those exotic purple stripes disappear during cooking.
I also planted some Chinese Red Long Beans this year, but they're not ready yet. More on them later.
What kinds of beans do you grow?