Did you grow green beans this summer in your garden? Before you yank those spent plants out and throw them on your compost pile, stop! You can save seeds for next year and you won’t have to buy them. And if you tried growing beans for storing and cooking, you’ll need to use this same technique to harvest them. It’s easy. Let’s go!
You planted your beans and watched them grow. If you planted bush beans, they are only about a foot high and if you planted pole beans, you watched them climb sky high over your fence or trellis (some even climbed up my apple tree!) And now it’s late summer and they are starting to give up the fight. Some pods are still green and some have turned brown.
Leave enough pods on the plants to save seeds for next year. Or if you are growing an entire bean harvest specifically to save beans for cooking, don’t pick a single pod!
This year I grew 3 varieties of tender green beans, but I also planted a large crop of black beans to save and cook during the winter. You can purchase them here if you’d like to give it a try!
To harvest bean seeds, leave your bean plants in the garden until the pods have become completely dry. Let me be clear – completely dry. Like so dry they rattle in the shells. If you harvest them when they are still tender at all, the seeds won’t be fully mature. The remaining moisture will potentially cause them to rot once you store them.
Collect all the dry pods and put them in a paper bag. As more pods dry out, add them to the bag and continue this until you have harvested everything you can from the plants. Then it’s time to “shell” them. This can take longer than you think, but it’s a satisfying project.
If you are like me – busy in the fall and bored in the winter – try this trick. Leave all your seeds (lettuce, spinach, radish, beans, etc…) in paper bags and deal with them during the cold winter months when you are dreaming of the garden but can’t grow anything outdoors. Sometimes I’ll cue up a great movie and get a bag of dried seeds out and sort through everything at the dining room table. You can certainly finish the process now, but I like to spend my time in the garden in the fall, and save this project for winter.
When you are ready, simply pry open the dry pods and take out the hard bean seeds. You may see a few that are too small or deformed. You may see a few that accidentally spouted if they were left in the rain too long before harvest. Just discard them.
Place the rest of the shelled beans in an envelop or jar. Seeds need to be kept dry! They also like a cool spot so if you have room in the back of your fridge, they will be happy their, but they will likely be fine on your book shelf as well. (Oh and throw the dried pods back on your compost pile.)
If you are saving them to replant them, label them and store them with your other seeds. If you planted beans to cook as well like I did this summer, store them in your pantry and enjoy cooking those little beauties this winter. What a treat to eat from your garden in the middle of winter! Try this recipe for slow-cooked Cowboy Beans (coming soon). Yum!