heirloom beans

The 2025 bean harvest

/ Elizabeth / 6 Comments

It’s been a staggeringly difficult year – for so many people, for so many different reasons. Our farming season was by far the most challenging we’ve experienced in our seven years here, and the bean harvest was…dispiriting, to understate the obvious. After a summer with no measurable moisture whatsoever, we experienced a too-late storm in October that managed to create mold on many of the beans, so the cleaning and sorting this year was more tedious and time-consuming than usual. Nevertheless, here are the heirloom beans we grew this year, with brief notes on each. Small quantities are available for sale to our local Surface Creek community; please contact me if you’d like to learn more about purchasing or growing beans. Previous bean harvest posts can be found here, here and here.

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The bean harvest

/ Elizabeth / 4 Comments

Our eight bean varieties from the 2022 harvest.

Here we are, dear friends, and yet again I’m singing songs of love and devotion to beans – specifically our own 2022 harvest! My total and complete adoration of dried beans is no secret. Not only are beans one of the most inexpensive yet nutritious whole foods available, but as nitrogen-fixing legumes they actually improve soil. They grow well in our tricky high-plains desert environment, they don’t require much water and they’re very low-maintenance. There can hardly be a better edible crop to grow! Plus, as the world gradually starts to realize that a meat-centric diet for nine billion people simply won’t work, beans (and other nutritious legumes and pulses) will become ever more important as plant-based proteins. We’d like to get ahead of that curve and start cultivating more edible legumes on our farm, for both our own health and our soils, so this year we planted a test crop.

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