Separating the beans from the chaff

Growing dry beans in our area is as touch and go as field corn.  While we have a long mild growing season, the heat units needed for these crops are sorely lacking.  But, in keeping with my local seed preserving interest, I have been happy to keep growing a dry bunch bean that has been a staple in our cool mountain region since the 1880’s.  No one on our farm grew these beans that I knew of, but tasting them frequently at potlucks, convinced me I needed to try it.  The seed I got had been handed down through the original family who had kept the variety going, but they moved west of Portland, in the banana belt, so to speak, and grown the beans there for many decades.  So I had my work cut out for me, reselecting for higher elevation and a shorter season.  Each year I have been selecting seeds from plants that have the highest percentage of dry pods before the fall rains begin.  Now I have a pretty predictable crop.  With at least two-thirds of the plants exhibiting dry pods by mid-September.  The rest are suitable for shelly beans, but I am after a staple crop that stores without any preserving needed, just a dry storage area.

A drizzly day in July.

The the two rows to the right are the dry beans.  I planted two 100′ rows with the expectation of harvesting approximately 8 – 10 pounds of dry beans per 100′.  We garden dry land, so the rows are on 4′ spacing with 5″ spacing between the plants in the row.  By September when it was time to begin harvesting the first dry pods, there was hardly any room between the rows.  Starting in early September, I picked all the dry pods from one entire row, and 1/3 of the second row, and stored these in the house for threshing later.  We received a short spell of rain and then went back to a two-week stretch of dry weather.  Busy with other more pressing harvests, I pulled the last of the plants just before the next bout of rain.  These are drying down in the barn.

This past weekend was sunny and bright, and a perfect time to thresh the first beans I had picked along with my pole bean seed for green beans.  Since I am only dealing with home garden/ pantry stocking quantities, I use a low tech approach to threshing my beans.  It’s so low tech it even bores the dogs!

“Please not the beans again… .”

“Wake me up when something exciting happens.”The bean pods are very sharp when they are dry, so I used a woven plastic feed bag, so as not to lose any of the precious beans.  I filled the bag half full, and proceeded to walk on the beans much like I did with my rutabaga seeds.

Disclaimer:  No beans were harmed in the making of this video.

After the “threshing” I shake the bag, the heavy beans make their way to the bottom and the chaff floats to the top.  This shaking also wakes up the sleeping dogs.

I found it easiest to pull out the empty beans pods while the whole mess was still in the bag.  Pulling out the empty pods and transfering them to a wheelbarrow to keep my work area clean was very effective.

I then dumped the sack of threshed beans onto a paper feed bag that I had slit open to make a large piece of clean paper on which to sort the beans.  A few stubborn pods remained and had to be shelled by hand.

This went fairly fast – light easy work on a rare sunny day.  Because I had picked these pods from the plants, I really didn’t have much in the way of chaff to winnow from the seeds.

The wheelbarrow loads of bean pods were added to the deep bedding in the nearby loafing shed – a great source of free carbon for the compost.

Before transferring the beans to a sack for transport to the house, I just lightly blew the remaining chaff away.  Pretty simple for home garden scale.  For market garden scale threshing check out Josh’s trial here:
http://grainsandpulses.blogspot.com/2009/10/dry-bean-trial.html

An hours work, yielded 17.5 pounds of beans.  I won’t have my final yield total until I thresh the pods that are still attached to the vines.  All in all, as far as calories go, potatoes are far easier to grow and yield many more pounds of food in the same space, my 100′ potato rows yielded approximately 125 pounds of potatoes.  However, diversity in the garden is important, and I also feel like I need to keep this variety going, since it was staple vegetable that was brought here by the area’s pioneers.

This post is also a part of Food Renegade’s Fight Back Friday.  The posts are always very informative during the week, but Fight Back Friday is a free-for-all of recipes and information.  Check it out.