Dried Bean Harvest 2014

Growing, processing and storing dried beans is easy! The array of types and colors is incredibly diverse making winter seed catalog perusal the perfect thing to do when the many shades of gray outdoors is starting to depress you.

Here's the easy process to inspire you to join us in the dry bean fan club:

Step 1: Plant and care for (and feel happy that the roots are fixing nitrogen in the soil, thereby improving your soil fertility just by growing!):

Step 2: Watch them climb (if they are runner or half-runner type beans). The red-flowered beans climbing the tripods on the left are scarlet runner beans - beautiful!

Step 3: Crush your pods inside a burlap sack and then winnow (drop slowly in front of a fan to blow the lighter chaff away). The much-heavier beans drop straight down and can be collected easily.

Step 4: Bag up your beans, separating out any that may be moldy or otherwise of poor quality:

Step 5: Put them in jars by species for storage. Not pictured are two quart jars of beans we already ate. Not bad for some beans tucked in here and there! We grew Scarlet Runner, Snow Cap, Jacob's Cattle and Bolita beans. Who knows yet what's on the grow list for 2015, but you can bet we are going to grow more!