Dried beans for winter use

Drying is obviously a good, low carbon method of food preservation, and the beans would provide a source of both protein and carbohydrate during the winter months.  They are also considerably nicer to eat than dried beans that you buy in the shops, and take less time to cook.

The first, Borlotto Lingua di Fuoco, never made it to the fully dried stage.  They were so delicious fresh out of the pods that we managed to eat almost the entire crop as we picked them, leaving only a few saved as seed for next year.  They're lovely just as a hot vegetable with butter and pepper, or as a bean salad with an olive oil, garlic and white balsamic vinegar dressing.

We didn't do very much better with the second, runner bean Czar.   This one is a white-seeded runner bean which produces large beans quite similar to butter beans.  The photo shows them after drying - with a 10p coin for size reference.

This too was very tasty as a semi-dry, but I did manage to keep back about a kilo for winter use. They were fantastic - I was very impressed both with their flavour and the size - they're almost as big as the Greek giant beans encountered on holiday.  Apparently you can use them to make hummus but I've not tried this yet.

The third variety is know just as Pea bean.  It's a type of climbing French bean which produces very pretty bi-coloured white and maroon beans (like little Yin Yang symbols).  During cooking the colours merge to turn the beans a a lovely shade of  earthy pink.   They were utterly delicious too, and I didn't grow enough to dry.

There's obviously a common theme emerging here - I didn't grow enough of any of them!  Next year I'll be growing larger numbers of all the above.  2008 was a lousy summer and this must have had an adverse effect on bean crops but there is another factor at work too. When you leave the pods on the plants to develop, the plants don't crop anything like so prolifically as when pods are picked at an immature stage, as is normally the case with say runner beans.  A plant that's prevented from setting seed puts all its energy into creating more, but if seeds are allowed to develop the production pressure is off, or significantly reduced.

My guesstimate is that in a comparison of runner beans grown for picking at the normal stage compared to those grown for dried seeds, you'd probably need about three times the number of plants to get the same weight of beans.  My view is that if you have the space and like beans at all then they're worth trying.  I thought they were all very good indeed, and don't really know why they're not more popular.  Anyone who grows and enjoys broad beans would probably think they're fantastic.