There is no food I love more than beans, and most of all: green beans. I love all of the vegetables I choose to plant in my garden, but there are none I look forward to more than my Kentucky Wonder and Blue Lake climbing beans. I love consuming them and the delightful process of picking them.
Every year I have planted them, they have been prolific and delicious – except for this year. What happened this year?!? The only thing I did differently was purchase the starts from a different nursery – and the source (which will remain nameless) is more of a hardware store with a nursery than a nursery dedicated selling only plants. I believe they were organic but maybe they weren’t…
I always purchase my seeds from Forni-Brown (which have always been delicious) but this year the pole bean seeds I came home with were mislabeled, as they came up as bush beans. (I still love you Forni-Brown!) So I ran off to a store to buy replacement starts, as I lost 3-4 weeks of growing time waiting for the seeds to come up and couldn’t wait to get my beans in the ground.
I picked this basket of beans this week, discarded the large ones that had taken grown too large in my absence, and retained the tender ones. I steamed them, added some olive oil and salt to the beans and they were fine, but not great. They are definitely not as special as prior years.
So, what lesson have I learned? Apparently where you source your bean seeds and plants, matters. Next year, I’ll be buying bean seeds from Seed Savers, an organization I joined and learned about from John Coykendall at Blackberry Farm. If you want to get excited about your next year’s potential beans, check out Seed Saver’s cool catalog. I can’t wait to order mine and look forward to having delicious beans next year!
Amendment: After visiting the French Laundry vegetable garden, it is possible that my problem is my soil and that I need to add nutrients to the soil to produce better tasting produce. In any event, next year will be a different story because not only will I amend my soil more effectively, but I will use fabulous seeds.
