Dual-purpose Provider Beans

Beans are generally an easy crop to grow. They need a moderate amount of compost, not near as much as tomatoes and other heavy-feeders, because as a legume, they fix nitrogen, but they do like more compost than peas. In our garden, we don't have any pests that attack the bean plants or leaves, but they are vulnerable before they emerge to cutworm damage. As we improve our garden soil, we will see fewer and fewer cutworms. In the meantime, our best preventative is to get the plants up and going as quickly as possible. This means planting when the soil conditions are warm and moist, and choosing a vigorous variety, which is a characteristic we have selected from our own previous crops. It can help to soak the beans overnight, this way the seed will not dry out in the ground, slowing germination. The seedpods are vulnerable to damage from the Corn earworm and the Cowpea curculio, both of which bore holes into the pods and feed on the seeds. But neither did much damage to our crop, the Corn earworm seems to prefer corn, and the Cowpea curculio kept mostly to the peapods. Beans can also succumb to mildew in wet seasons like 2008, but a healthy crop will be able to resist these vulnerabilities.

This year we grew two varieties of beans, Provider for green beans, and Jacob's Cattle for dried baking beans. Canned green beans, being our favorite green vegetable for the winter, are a staple. We planted 200 row feet in 2008. We enjoy baked beans occasionally, but not as a staple, I would be happy with 10 lbs, so we planted 100 row feet. The two varieties are side by side, and we do save seeds from them, beans generally self-pollinate, so even heavy insect traffic in the prolific flowers do not seem to cross-pollinate the two varieties. They have not crossed in three years. I choose my plants for seed saving at the flowering and early fruiting stage. That's when I can pick out the early and heavy producers that look healthy and dark green. I tie red wool yarn around the bush, so that it is obvious to see when harvesting, not to pick any pods from these plants. All of the pods that these plants produce are allowed to go to seed, 6-12 plants will give you a pound of seed.

Well, with so much rain early in the season, we had a bumper crop of green beans. I had never seen so many pods on the Provider plants, by mid-season they were heavy with green beans. The more I picked, the more they flowered. The Jacob's Cattle beans have never impressed me with their yield, they only put out about 15-20 seedpods and quit flowering. The Provider plants, under identical conditions produce 25-50% more pods.

Maturing Jacob's Cattle pods

Our 200 row feet of green beans proved to be too prolific for our needs, we were eating a huge mess of buttered green beans, and I was canning them as quickly as they could grow. Once I had enough canned, and we couldn't give any more away, I could easily see that we would not be able to keep up with them. I hate to let food go to waste, especially when we have worked the ground, used precious compost, planted the seeds, and weeded the crop. I tried feeding the pods to the chickens, but not much interest there. I even tried giving some to the cow, but that was just a waste when she had lush clover pastures. So I thought I would simply let part of the crop go to seed. The dried bean seeds would either be good for eating, or at the very least, we could chop the dried beans in the meat grinder and feed them to the chickens as a high-protein supplement over the winter. One third of the crop was enough to keep us in fresh green beans for the rest of the season. The other two-thirds of late maturing bean pods did not fully dry on the plants, I had to pick them before frost, and let them finish curing indoors.

The baking beans dried well on the plants, the pods were brittle and the beans hard. I prefer letting them dry on the plant because I can pick the pods off the plants on a dry day, and put them aside to shell on a rainy day or when the season slows down.

100 row feet of Jacob's Cattle baking beans yielded one pound of seed, and 6.5 lbs of beans. It was a poor crop, but even still, six good pots of chili or baked beans.

After shelling the Provider beans, I let them dry out until they were hard and cured. This late and unexpected crop yielded 4 lbs of beans. All told 200 row feet of Provider beans produced 103 lbs green beans, 2 lbs seed, and 4 lbs beans. The dried beans look like a kidney bean, so I thought I would try them out in a chili, and see how they taste.

I soaked equal parts of Jacob's Cattle beans, Provider beans and Chickpeas overnight, and made a chili the following day. It turned out to be a cold snowy day, perfect for chili. And it tasted great.

Seeing how prolific the Provider variety is, and the added benefit that the early green pods can be eaten, and the late pods allowed to dry for baking beans, this one variety may become my single dual-purpose variety of bean. I enjoy the colorful markings on the Jacob's Cattle variety, but once cooked I could not tell them apart. In the end, I got my 10 lbs of dried baking beans for the winter. As we begin to make garden plans for 2009 we will have to decide whether to try another variety of baking bean, or to plant Provider beans for both our needs.