This week, Brian and I harvested our first ever crop of lima beans. This is the 1/three year that we've got attempted to grow them: in 2012 we were given best one plant, and remaining yr we tried planting them along the fence within the lower back of our cherries and have been given none at all. But this yr, we sold a sparkling packet and set apart a whole half trellis for them, and that they have got undoubtedly swarmed over it, even leaping the space to unfold their tendrils to the next trellis over as properly. I'm not advantageous what we did right this time that we didn't do earlier than; maybe the seeds in our antique packet have been simply duds, or possibly it changed into the cooler climate we had this summer that made the difference. Whatever the motive, I'm not approximately to appearance a present bean inside the pod.
Since it is our first time developing them, we had been now not sure precisely how to inform when they had been ripe. We concept maybe we may want to without a doubt leave them all at the vine and harvest them right earlier than frost, but finally the pods turned brown and started out to interrupt up open, and we concept perhaps it is probably better to select out them rather than hazard damage to the beans. At first appearance, it gave the impression of our flowers had produced pretty a bounty already, because the pods we picked genuinely stuffed our 2-quart kitchen colander. However, it turns out that, at the same time as shelled, quarts of pods produce a miles smaller quantity of suitable for consuming beans?And a far huge quantity of empty shells. Once they have been split open, they take in twice as an awful lot room, so we filled the colander two times with the empties.
Moreover, some of the beans we eliminated from the pods failed to look pretty normal. They had been starting to split open and slip out of their skins. We're now not nice whether or not or now not those mutant-searching beans are ok to devour; I think they probable wouldn't hurt us, but I suspect they might not taste the same as normal beans or put together dinner on the equal rate. I'm questioning whether or not the terrific use for them is probably to set them apart for planting subsequent year, since it looks like they've got a head start on sprouting already. Alternatively, possibly we may want to sprout them and consume them that way, as a poster known as
So, out of our original two quarts of lima bean pods, we ended up with about 7 ounces of intact beans, plus about two ounces of the split ones. On top of that, there are still lots of green pods left out on the vines waiting to be picked. And once we've harvested the lot, they'll still need to be dried, a process that's apparently a bit more complicated than I thought. According to this article I found on WikiHow, you can't just put them in a jar and let them sit there until you're ready to use them; if you want them to dry evenly, you have to either spread them out in the sun, string thread through them and hang them up, or bake them on cookie sheets in the oven.
Once all the beans are gathered in and dried, it's not clear whether our actual yield will be more than a pound—about the equivalent of a $1.20 bag from the grocery store, and just enough for one good batch of butter beans with bacon. So all in all, I'm having my doubts about whether growing lima beans is a good use of our limited garden space. We might be better off just buying our limas at the store and using the extra trellis place for more butternut squash, since the three we planted this year have only produced a total of six squash.
Between the limas, the butternuts, and the brussels sprouts that so far have no sign of sprouts on them, it's shaping up to be a pretty disappointing fall harvest for 2014. Our season of mists and mellow fruitfulness may end up being a lot more misty than fruitful.
