Beans!

I was reading The Quarter Acre Farm by Spring Warren last month and in it, she made an interesting claim. She described how organic beans from a grocery store’s bulk bin would sprout and become bean plants. Apparently they’re not processed in a way that destroys the life force within them.

So about three weeks ago, I went to the health food store and bought bulk, organic black and garbanzo beans. Figuring this was gonna be a solid experiment, I sowed about twenty square feet of beans, with a quarter of them being either the black or garbanzo variety. The square foot gardening method (which I use to gauge spacing) says you can plant 9 beans per square foot, that’s a pretty good ratio to space.

Here’s how they’ve grown:

Beans, Day 11

Beans, Day 17

I’m seeing a high percentage of sprouting so far, which is really exciting! After I took the 11 day photo above, I went back to the store and bought four more varieties of beans. The big advantage to buying beans to seed this way is the cost savings versus buying from a conventional seed company. Below is a picture of the bulk bin beans I bought:

L to R: Black Eyed Peas, Kidney, Pinto & Adzuki

For all those beans, I paid 40 cents. It’s hard to believe! This summer, I really want to produce as much food as I can and beans are gonna be an important component to that. Confidently, I planted these four varieties in two square feet each to see what would happen. Here we are today, just six days later:

Bean Sprouts after 6 days

Closer look at Black Eyed Pea sprouts

I’m pretty excited! Over the past few weeks, I’ve built or cleared a couple other beds for beans and tried my hand at companion planting.

Squash, Bush Beans, Melons & Sunflowers

Bush Beans, Cucumber, Chicory, Sweet Pea

Another great reason to plant beans is that they are known as a nitrogen fixer for the soil. As I understand it, nitrogen fixing plants can absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere and with the help of bacteria along the roots, make it available within the soil. Nitrogen is a component of chlorophyll and an essential nutrient for the growth of plants. Farmers use plants in the legume family (beans, peas, clovers, alfalfa, lupines) as a natural way to fertilize and bring nitrogen for future plants’ use to the soil. It’s all very interesting and something I continue to learn about.

With the beans growing success, I have decided that in places where seeding has failed, over the next few weeks, I will plant more beans. Hopefully by the end of the season, we are stocked with a great variety (and quantity) of beans. We’ll see!

---

Words in blue are “defined” on the Glossary page