I've used the pinto beans I buy dry at the grocery. I've planted them, eaten them green, then also cooked and eaten them dry. I love the anasazi beans, but have not had a chance to plant any yet.

Bon I did not know anything about blackeyed peas except canned and dried from store... yuk and yuk.
Until we picked peas one summer in Shamrock.
The lady of the place taught me how to shell and cook fresh and it is a whole different pea. I prefer mine cooked with snaps which are just baby pea pods. We shell ours and throw in some snaps and put them in a pillow case and then a trash bag and into the freezer. No washing no blanching. I just cooked some from last summer and they are just like fresh.
Dried on the vine they will contain more folic acid and iron and easier to store dry, so both ways are good to me.
I didn't grow my own last year but I will this year. my grandson loves them cooked with bacon, onion and banana peppers.
kim

Oh yeah - love those black-eyes! Try them with a little hot (spicy) chow chow on the side. Guess I'm going to have to break down and end up planting some this year. Think we still have a few cases left, but you know - you have to stay prepared, right?
Mary

I planted about three hundred feet of Pink Eye, Purple Hull Peas about five days ago. It rained the following day. This morning I saw some coming up. We plan to eat them green and can a bunch.

They only cost $2.25 for 1/2#.

That is a lot of food for $2.25.

And Bon - Dawn shared a neat bit of info with me a few years ago about Purple Hull Peas. Save the purple hulls after you shell them. They make a jelly that taste closer to grape than the jelly you buy in the grocery store!!!

Gives you another benefit from the plant besides just the pea! I've linked a site that has some neat recipes and information.

Paula

Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.purplehull.com/

Oh that is right up my alley too !
thanks Paula
kim

Sadie, as excited as I am you'll be seeing pictures unless they fail, somehow. How exciting! Hopefully, I can plant the entire bag o beans and just wait until I harvest some to see how they taste. I read only great reviews online about recipes using anasazi (heck, I keep looking to see how it's spelled). I would be mighty proud to see all those pretty beans right out of the garden. And I hope to get an entire bag of store-bought pinto beans in the ground now that I can gobble some during the process!

Kim, it's almost suicide by tin can, right there. I've done it but I was the only one eating. And it was New Year's Eve. And I'd had a few drinks. One time we ran out of food while waiting for payday. We kept waiting and waiting. We cleared everything normal out of the pantry and, then, we had gone through all the less-than-palatable things just to shut our stomachs. There was a can of black eyed peas in there. Not a soul touched them, not even me. Eventually, I threw that can out!

Bacon, onion and banana peppers. I'm salivating over here. I don't know how my grandma made hers. I will definitely try this version.

Mary, I remember my grandmother was always well prepared with those black eyed peas and everyone loved 'em! When we visited them in Arkansas we'd always arrive late evening because we headed out of Oklahoma after Dad's working hours. When we arrived the order of events was 1) Hugs 2) Food she had ready for us and 3) A fresh jar of canned black eyed peas for me with a spoon. I ate them right out of the jar.

Mr. Coleman, because of you I have peas on my desk. I compared my store-bought to the pictures over at Baker Creek. I do believe these look like the purple hull variety! It's like Christmas all over a hill of beans. And cheap!

Paula, this is too good. I can dine, slap and get jelly, too!

Thank you, everyone, for making my day. Gawd I love this gardening stuff!

me too Bon. I cant believe I wasted so much time not gardening. Wonder what I did with all that free time?

I was out this morning in the dirt weeding and the neighbor stops by to talk looking at me kinda weird. Oh ya I have on pjs and covered in mud dots. Its ok right...
kim

Bon - your posts are a delight to read. Makes my day! DH and I both can relate to eating black-eyes right out of the jar. I put ours up with about 1/3 snaps and 2/3 shellers. Ye gads - I'm going to have to go get a jar out for lunch........

Kim - it's already 89F here. And boy oh boy are the mosquitoes out in force! I'll never complain about the rain or the associated mud, but I can't believe the amount of mosquitoes we have. Daring suckers follow you into the house - now that's just not fair! They are even in my greenhouse. That's double not fair because that's my retreat spot....
Mary

I'll be certain to update when I blow a hole through the kitchen ceiling while trying to make that purple hull jelly. LOL

Bon - no need for hole-blowing. I learned by trial and error. Save enough hulls to fill a crock-pot. Pour enough water over those to just almost cover them. Set and go to work (8 to 10 hours on Low). When you get home - strain the juice thru a cheese cloth or one of those wonderful stainer thingy's that Ball sells at Atwoods. Then throw the hulls away. Freeze the juice till you have time or make the jelly right then. It should give you close the to amount of juice needed for a recipe.

Dawn will back me up on this that the other types of cowpea's give other flavors of jelly. The only other one I've tried is Lady Peas - which really do give an apple-flavored jelly.

A really funny side-note - my g-daughter (who's almost 13 now) did NOT like jelly when she was little. At. All. But since she helped plant and harvest the purple hulls...tried the jelly I made...when she was like 7. She LOVED IT! It was the ONLY jelly she would eat then and still. I've never told her it came from a vegetable. heh!

Bon, The world of beans and southern peas is incredibly diverse and many of them are multipurpose and can be eaten as snap beans/peas, shelly beans/peas or dried beans/peas. An old southern method of drying them in the pods gives you "leather britches" to store and cook later. Some varieties make better leather britches than others. You'll have a ball exploring the world of legumes.

We almost always only eat our home-grown beans and southern peas in the green stage, whether frozen or fresh.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of us sitting on the porch, snapping beans or shelling peas, with glasses of lemonade or kool-aid sitting beside us, while big luna moths flailed around, beating their wings against the screen door beneath the porch light. Now...that is a great childhood memory! Forget Disneyland or Carlsbad Caverns, which were fun in their own way. I treasure simpler memories a lot more.

I normally do not dry the beans I raise. Dried beans are as cheap as can be at the store, especially black-eyed peas (although the commercial varieties sold usually are inferior to the pinkeye purple hulls) and pinto beans. I'd rather use the ones we raise as snaps or shellies, which are a lot more expensive at the store than dry beans. A couple of weeks ago we were at Central Market in Southlake and they had shelled fresh pink eye purplehull peas in a container that might have had 10-12 oz. in it and cost either $5 or $6. I tried to imagine what it would cost to buy all the peas I raise annually, and couldn't even imagine it.

I grow tons of beans and tons of southern peas. I like diversity so plant many varieties of each. Just in the southern pea category, you have pinkeye purple hulls, crowders, black-eyed peas, zipper peas, lady peas and cream peas, with many named varieties of each.

One thing to remember is that heat has the same effect on bean (but not southern pea) blooms that it has on tomato blossoms, so you have to plant them at the right time in spring (April) for a summer harvest, and keep your fingers crossed that the weather won't heat up too early. If you plant late, most varieties won't produce well because they'll be blooming when temperatures are over 90 degrees and a lot of the blossoms will drop without forming beans. You can, however, plant beans again in the mid-summer for a fall harvest. We call those October beans here, with October not being a variety, but rather being the main time you're generally harvesting them.

With southern peas, there's tons of varieties and I'm not happy unless I plant at least six kinds every year, but it is okay with me if most of those six varieties are some form of pink eye purplehull. So far I have planted the following southern peas: CT Pinkeye Purple Hull, Pinkeye Purple Hull BVR, Big Boy Pinkeye Purple Hull, Quick Pick Pinkeye Purple Hull, Red Ripper and Mackey (said to be a family selection of PEPH from Louisiana). Still waiting for a spot in the garden? Whippoorwill and Tohono O'odham, The latter is a southern pea from the native people of the southwestern part of the USA. This bean has the black and white markings like a holstein cow and is very drought-tolerant and heat-tolerant. To see a great selection of plants from the Native peoples of this county, check out Native Seed/SEARCH at the link below.

With green beans, we eat most of them as snap beans but every now and then I'll grow a variety or two to use as shelly beans. Of course, Lima Beans always are shelled for cooking. I grow 6 to 10 varieties of snap beans every year, but mostly in the fall if the cold weather hangs on deeply into late spring like it did this year. The late cold is too often followed by a quick warm-up that makes bean blossoms fall. We were in the upper 90s today, so with that sort of weather already arriving, I do not have high hopes for my FM1K pole beans that I have growing on the garden fence. They might be able to hang on all summer and produce in the fall though. Regardless, I can plant more in July for a fall harvest if these look too tired from fighting the heat, pests and diseases by then.

Your general fall planting dates for legumes here are: Southern peas and Pole Snap Peas July 15-30, Bush Snap Beans and Lima Beans August 10-20. If you plant later than that, you run the risk of losing the peas and beans to frost before they mature. If you plant earlier (and sometimes I risk it in a rainy and cooler-than-average summer), your plants will be subjected to the stress of a lot of extra heat and pests but won't produce earlier unless the weather cools down early (sure, like that is ever gonna happen).

You just have to experiment with both beans and southern peas and figure out what types of each your family likes to eat. Experimenting with the different tastes and textures is as much fun as growing them. My family likes to eat the broad/wide Romano-type snap beans, which are a good, meaty bean with a strong beany flavor.

A more colorful diet is a more healthy diet, so I grow beans in a huge variety of colors. For this fall I have Tanya's Pink Pod (pink, obviously), and Puriat (purple), Capitano (yellow), as well as Garrafal d'oro (green), and also Purple Dove (purple). Then, in the haricot verts category, I'm growing Slenderette (green), Purple Queen (purple) and Golden Roc d'Or (yellow). I've got Contender and Provider for plain old green snap beans, and Purple Velour for tasty and tender purple snaps for fresh eating only. (They don't freeze well). I've also got Tenderstar for fall, and some Insuk's Wang Kong.

Some years I grow some cutshorts and some greasy beans, and I may plant some odds and ends I have left over from previous years for fall, if it manages to rain between now and planting time in July.

Pole beans are beautiful and very productive and you don't have to bend or stoop over to pick them, and there's tons of good ones. I usually grow some of the following most years: Rattlesnake, Louisiana Purple Pole, Blue Coco, Jeminez, Cherokee Greasy, Cherokee Cornfield, Garrafal d'Or, Musica, Red-Striped Greasy and sometimes McCaslan or Potomac or other cutshort or greasy bean varieties.

Scarlet Runner Beans do not produce well in heat, so are better for fall harvest than summer harvest, and Insuk's Wang Kong is the one I've grown for several years now. I never get a great many beans from them, but usually plant them to climb my 12-foot-tall ornamental windmill and the hummingbirds love their blossoms.

Don't forget Lima Beans. There is so much more to Lima Beans than just plain old green ones. I like to grow all kinds of butterbeans, include Violet's Multicolored Beans, Worcester Indian Red, Henderson Bush Bean and Christmas.

While most snap beans are either bush form or vining form, there's some that are somewhere in between and they usually are called half-runners. Some half-runners I've grown get taller than bush beans but not quite as tall as pole beans if they have nothing to climb. Give them something to climb, though, and some of the half-runners climb almost as tall as traditional pole beans. In this category I usually grow State Half-Runner or Mountaineer Half-Runner.

We haven't even discussed yardlong (asparagus) beans (which are more like southern peas than traditional beans), or dried beans. I usually grow the red asparagus beans. With dried beans, I like to grow Borlotto Tongue of Fire or Signora della Campagna.

And we haven't touched on moth beans, tepary beans, fava beans or Edamame (soybeans).

All the talk of pinkeye purplehull jelly makes me smile and brings back fond memories.

As with tomatoes, there's thousands of bean varieties and at least a few dozen varieties of southern peas, so you can explore them forever and never run out of new varieties to try. John Withee collected and save just under 1,200 bean varieties. I cannot even imagine all the work it took to raise them and save the seeds and keep all those varieties pure.

Oh, and there's rice beans too.

The bean world is endlessly fascinating, and my favorite bean varieties change constantly depending on which ones had the best flavor and productivity in any given year.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: NativeSeeds/SEARCH

Clip. Clip. Clip!

That's just a bunch o beans!

I'm curious, tho, if you can provide a general idea of the germination rates of home-saved dried beans assuming they are handled and stored properly.

I'm really into seeing how things grow and where in the garden they prefer to grow and, of course, getting roots in the ground other than weeds and bermuda. Then, when I get comfy I figure the rows will start shaping up, the foot paths will reveal themselves and I can constructing the lay outs for support for my convenience.

I'm gearing up now for the fall crops! I'll be sure to include alotta beans.

(And I was wondering why my tomato flowers were falling off. Thanks for that.)

Oh what a joy to have so much space!

Here's an old thread on beans, which I saved after "my personal secretary" was kind enough to dig it up for me ;)

George
Tahlequah, OK

Here is a link that might be useful: Beans for Oklahoma

You know it's good reads when ya gotta bookmark. Thanks to the "personal secretary"!!

George, I cannot believe how old that thread is! Have we really been talking about beans in such detail for so long? I don't know where the years have gone. It is a privilege to serve as your private secretary.

Bon, Well, for normal people like you and me, I think you can get reasonably good germination from home-grown, saved seed, properly stored in cool and dry conditions, for maybe 3-4 or even 5 years. For the king of the seed savers (George), it is possible to get good germination 10 years down the road, or even more if the beans were stored inside a lamp, or inside an airtight container in a deep freeze and were opened properly after being removed from the freezer.

The effect of temperature on the blossoms of many kinds of vegetables has been studied, researched and documented, and probably with tomatoes more than anything else. I'll add this though: in extreme and exceptional drought, in August when highs are often in the 105-112 range and lows are in the upper 70s or low 80s, as long as the relative humidity values are very low (likely in the low teens or single digits), I've gotten fruitset on all kinds of tomato plants, including Big Boy, Better Boy, Arkansas Traveler, Burgundy Traveler, Carmello and Phoenix. Carmello set fruit all summer in 2011 when our August highs were 110-116 degrees, and Phoenix only went a week or two without setting fruit. If you have both excessive heat and average to high humidity in combination, the fruitset usually doesn't occur. So, even though we know that blossom drop occurs for many varieties once the highs are around/exceeding 90-92 degrees and the lows are around/exceeding 70-72, we cannot discount the fact that the humidity plays a role. If you get "lucky" and have very low humidity along with the high temps, you can get some fruit set despite ridiculously hot temperatures.

Tomato plants are relentlessly optimistic and just keep setting blooms even if none are forming fruit, and all it takes is to have a couple of cool days in the midst of otherwise hot weather and you'll get more fruit set. Even though it is easy to say that tomatoes stop setting fruit once the hot temperatures set in, it would be more truthful to say that they mostly stop setting fruit, but not completely. Also, it seems like the larger the fruit produced by the tomato plant, the earlier the heat shuts it down. That's why you'll see big beefsteaks and slicers drop off first in productivity once it gets hot, but the smaller fruit, including some paste tomatoes and most bite-sized varieties continue to set fruit until it gets significantly hotter.

One way the heat/humidity seem to impact fruit set is that they make the pollen "sticky" so it clumps together inside the flower and doesn't move around enough for pollination/fertilization to occur. You can thump your tomato blossoms gently (but it doesn't have to be incredibly gently) in the cool of the morning to loosen and shake up some of that sticky pollen to encourage fruit set. Texas garden guru Neil Sperry used to recommend walking down a row of caged tomato plants, whacking each cage a couple of times with an old tennis racket to shake up the pollen. I like that method---quick, easy and effective.

Beans have a similar problem, but some of them set better at hotter temperatures than others. Sweet peppers are more affected by hot temperatures during fruit set than hot peppers.

This is the kind of stuff you'll first learn by reading, and then later learn by observation, on your garden journey. It is so much easier to tolerate blossom drop on tomato plants, for example, when you understand it is a climate or temperature and/or relative humidity issue than just a matter of tomato blooms randomly falling off for no reason at all.

Dawn

Ya'll inspired me....I'm ordering some southern peas to send to my friend in the Philippines. He said they would grow them in their trial garden and see how well they liked them.

Lisa

Yeah, Dawn. It's humid. We even got a sprinkle this morning and I hate the humidity but cannot complain. I know I can look forward to bad cases of powdery mildew. Even the native dandelion is infested with it!

At least the compost and compostables are happy. That much will pay off over time.