Bean There, Done That

Anna picked a few beans too

I picked some of my beans today and sold them to the local garden centre. They will sell them on, and the beans will be served up on the dinner plates of strangers, or who knows, perhaps an unwitting friend. 

Most of them, over 2.5kg, were runner beans. I have a hundred runner bean plants, all of the variety Scarlet Emperor. If you don't stop the runners when they reach the top they would normally flop over and trail down, but because my garden is encased in a giant protective net they reach up and cling to it, climbing through and producing beans way out of reach. Unless you have a harvesting ladder!

The seeds for the runner bean plants come from the Seed Cooperative, a new organisation in the UK committed to producing seed which is both organic and open-pollinated (ie naturally pollinated by insects or wind). They even tell you where their seed is grown - my runner bean seeds were grown at Ruskin Mill College, Nailsworth, Gloucestershire.

I sold nearly a kilo of green (or French) beans. Two thirds of these were the Cobra variety - long, thin, with a circular cross-section. What you might expect a green bean to look like. The rest were a heritage bean called Romano - flatter, slightly paler and shorter. The Romano bean seed was produced by local grower and friend Lynn, a couple of years ago, and passed to me at a seed-swap event, along with another called Bridgwater which I'm also growing - this is grown for the bean inside the pod, not the pods themselves, and a wonderfully dappled and colourful bean it is.

French beans dominating in the polytunnel

We need to know more about where our food comes from, but more than that - we need to know where the seed that begets the food comes from. Most seed catalogues will not tell you a thing about where their seed originates. Mostly it will be from abroad, produced in climates different from our own. They will have been optimised for the commercial growers, not for gardeners - for uniformity, not for taste.




I love eating my beans that grew from seed that came from Lynn's field, just down the road. I will save some seed and offer her some back. Each time we do that, choosing the best plants to take seed from, the seed adapts a little better to our local conditions. Take control of your own veg supply!