Now, I am a bit behind, but I figure you still want to know what we've been keeping busy with for the last two months anyways. So, bear with me as I try and catch up to the present.
In early October it was time to start harvesting the dry beans. We had created a lot of funky trellis systems for the pole beans and what we learned is that having pole beans around is a lot more work than having bush beans. It's extra work to put up a trellis that is both sensible, inexpensive, and actually holds up to the weight of the beans (and a row of beans is very very heavy!). We had varying degrees of success and failure.
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| Fail |
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| Success sort of |
So, by early October we were ready to start harvesting the beans. We started with the bush beans, cutting them down to the ground and leaving the roots behind to decompose, spreading the whole plant onto sheets to dry and cure in the sun for a week or so.
Once they had dried down enough and I finally found a moment, it was time to start the process of cleaning the beans from the pods. I put together what we had for cleaning seeds on a large scale. I grabbed a soil sifter from the shed at the farm, the seedling boxes I made for sowing seeds to use as another sifter size, more sheets, a couple of clean 5 gallon buckets, a wooden box, a cardboard box, some gloves, and the incomplete potting bench that is waiting for a table top. All these things were used in various moments in order to get those beans clean. Bean cleaning took me most of a day for three varieties of beans: calypso, painted pony, and hopi yellow bean.
It took me awhile to figure out a good rhythm for cleaning. First I would stomp on the entire batch of beans with my sandals, crunching out a rhythm as I went along. Then I would take smaller batches of the plants and start to wring and crunch the whole plant, pods and all over the soil sifter to try and break the beans out of the pods. When I thought I had all the beans out of the pods, the plant material would go on another sheet as the beans fell through the sifter to the sheet below. I did this over and over until I had all of the beans on the sheet below the sifter.
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| stomping on beans |
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| close up of calypso |
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| the bean cleaning set up |
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| calypso beans and its sifted chaff |
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| calypso beans in a box |
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| hopi yellow beans |
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| hopi yellow beans sifted over the soil sifter |
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| painted pony beans and its chaff |
After that step it was time to start to separate the chaff from the beans. I would use my seedling boxes that have a finer hardware cloth at the base as a way to sift out the smaller pieces of chaff leaving the beans and larger chaff behind. The small chaff I saved as it might be useful for a component of a seedling soil mix at a later date. I then put the beans and larger chaff into a 5 gallon bucket where I would swirl and shake at just the right tempo in order to bring the lighter chaff to the top and the heavier beans to the bottom (just like when you find the raisins at the bottom of a box of raisin bran or something. Heavy things sift down to the bottom while lighter things sift closer to the top - it's a physics thing). I then would carefully scoop off the chaff and leave behind the beans.
In the end I had one cardboard box partly full of calypso beans, a 5 gallon bucket half full of painted pony beans and a small cardboard box full of hopi yellow beans. I still have to clean the turkey craw beans and Grandma Nellie's yellow mushroom beans, but they weren't completely dried down in October. Now it will be a good rainy day project. The mayflower beans we also grew ended up not producing pods in time to ripen before it started to cool down and rain. We basically lost those beans to mold. The turkey craw beans had to be carefully pulled and cut from our trellis system and I pulled off as many of the mostly ripened pods I could. The rest of the plant ended up like mayflower with most of the plant molding and the most of the pods being under developed. So the lesson was that we probably planted the pole beans too late and that maybe we should try and stick with bush beans for ease of growing, managing, harvesting and cleaning.
Now we know about how much we get out of a bed of beans and how much work it is. We'll have to choose carefully what types of beans to grow for dry beans for next year. The pods that break apart very easily are best when having to clean lots and lots of beans. The hopi yellow was actually the easiest to clean, followed by the painted pony and last the calypso. Trial and error and time is what we need to figure out the best beans to grow for our purpose. Anyone out there know of the perfect bean to grow for dry beans? There's gotta be a good one out there!
