The musical fruit

I promise this will be the final word on this years dry bean harvest.  The final threshing of the beans were on my canning/preserving list, although I didn’t mention it.  I like to add things to my list that I can cross off – that way I think I have accomplished something!

A sunny day in late November was my chance to bail and head to the barn, and throw open the south-facing doors.  Applesauce and sauerkraut were far from my mind – again.

T bag and bean bags

Too hot for winter coats

My crew consisted of the usual velcro pups.  One front and center, and one in the shade.

The Ruminatrix

Also the rear bagger was present.  It’s always nice to have company to talk to while you work

That’s what 18 pounds of beans look like.  I did the plastic feed bag trick on these too.  On a food safety note:  I bought this old baby bathtub at an estate sale, there is no telling how many babies’ behinds have graced it

All this chaff got me to thinking about a simple way to get rid of the chaff.

Loading the poor man’s fanning mill.  And presto, it works!

The final tally:  35 1/2 pounds from 200 row feet. 

Dry beans are a touchy crop in our area, but these are heirloom seeds handed down to me so I feel obligated to keep them going.  Definitely not a money-maker, but a good addition to the variety of food we can grow for our own table. 

By pulling the plants and allowing them to finish drying, and then threshing by hand, I was able to minimize the waste.   About half dried before the fall rains, and I could have harvested the remaining beans as fresh shell beans, but that would have defeated my purpose of having  one more vegetable that I could store as is.  Fresh shell beans would require canning or freezing – dry beans can be stored indefinitely.

A farmer friend commented earlier about his yield in a similar growing situation.

Josh Volk

Great post, as always. Those look a lot like the Boston Favorites we grew this year, our highest yielding dry bean. I’m surprised that you don’t get dry pods earlier. We’re also up at 1000′, although our South aspect might help, and the lack of cool air draining from higher (I suppose we’re also on the West Side which is a bit of a banana belt). We ended up pulling most plants, which were fully dry, in August.Josh’s experiment shows how important knowing your microclimate is in gardening.  Our location is usually lumped into USDA zone 8, which really doesn’t help a vegetable gardener at all – that would suggest we could grow warm weather crops easier than someone in a zone 5 garden.  But that is not true, while Western Oregon has mild, dry summers, we do not have very many warm nights in the summer.  That is what counts, not how cold it is in January. 

 

While Josh’s venture is commercial, ours is home scale,  we both have the same objectives.  Growing a good amount of food using dryland and low-input methods is on our minds.

My observation on these beans this summer was that I had a huge difference in yield from one row to the other, due to soil conditions.  I did not keep the rows separate when harvesting because of weather constraints, but my best estimate would be that the poorer row produced maybe 12 pounds of the total, with the remaining 23 pounds coming from the second row.  For the most part the plants in the first row produced approximately 10 – 12 pods per plant, they were more stressed during the hot weather and therefore dried their pods down faster.  On the other hand, the plants in the second row had 25 to 30 pods per plant and were better able to handle the hot, dry conditions better, however they did not get in any hurry to dry.  From a nutritional standpoint, I would have to say the stressed plants and resulting beans would not be as strong in nutrients as the other beans that did continue to grow and never really showed any signs of stress.

That is where we sometimes lose ourselves in the business of food.  If I am tunnel visioned and my only objective is to get beans dry, then I am not paying attention to the actual conditions of the plants throughout the growing season.  It may be a matter of opinion only as to what is more important.  Yield, dry down, or nutritional value.

The other question I am sure that is bugging some readers here is why bother with 35# of beans that you can buy?  I checked Azure Standard and I can purchase 25# of organic pinto beans for $22.00.  But, that is the slippery slope of only counting the end price at the store.  My beans at a farmers market may be worth $5.00 a pound, or if I had a CSA they could be metered out for winter shares, or in a farm/restaurant setting they would be part of a value added menu item.  The costs of working off the farm are high too, by the time I went to work, to earn the money to buy the beans from Azure, I think the expenses including taxes, time, etc., would be the same.  For me, I would rather stay home and earn non taxed “wages”.   

I won’t lump my produce in with Azure Farms commodity organic fare.  They use lots of off-farm inputs to bring their crops to the warehouse – they are certified organic, and doing a great job, but while their farm is only 75 miles from my house, the food miles add up to much more than that, if you take into consideration all the inputs, large equipment etc.  If I can grow my own beans, with a hoe, wheelbarrow and a few recycled feed bags, I should leave those beans at Azure for someone else who can’t.   

Kitchen sink chili

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