Bean Watch 2008: hypogeal versus epigeal

Imagine harvesting vibrant, violet-hued pods that are not only a visual feast but also packed with nutrients and flavor. Whether you’re spicing up a stir-fry or looking to add a splash of color to your garden, Purple Beans are your ticket to an extraordinary experience.

Another Trader Joe's recall, this time for Texas Tamale Company's Gourmet Black Bean Tamales (in nine states), has customers wondering what's going on with their much-loved grocery store. This is the sixth recall by the company, which has 564 markets nationwide. 

A little brown bird with a big personality, the chiff chaff is named after its song, which sounds like it’s saying “chiff chaff, chiff chaff”. You can hear this in spring and summer when they’re breeding, the rest of the time they make a contact call that sounds like it’s saying “hweet, hweet”, which I associate with the onset of autumn. Typically a summer migrant, most chiff chaffs spend winter in the Mediterranean and West Africa, before returning to the UK to breed. However, increasingly, more are overwintering here due to the milder winters and the availability of insects to eat.

If you’ve never heard of Caribbean pine (Pinus caribaea), you probably don’t live in the tropics off the coast of Mexico or the American Southeast. In these locations, the Caribbean pine is known as an important timber tree and a useful tree to combat erosion. If you are interested in learning something about this tall, fast-growing conifer, read on.

The weather has been pretty awful of late, with one winter storm after another bringing high winds and heavy rain to the garden. Saturday dawned mild and bright, and so it was definitely time to get some garden time in. I decided that the first order of business was to plant out the broad beans that I sowed in the Plotting Shed over the winter. I sowed two different sorts – field beans and a proper broad bean ‘Czak Rusga’. The field beans were, for the most part fine. The Czak Rusga tended to rot without sprouting, although two of the plants did make it in the end. The resulting plants are a bit of a motley crew.

Did you sleep well last night? You would not have felt so cosy if your mattress had been infested with bed bugs (Cimex lectularius), an ancient pest that is making a comeback in the modern world, complete with pesticide resistence. Looking for a new solution to this age-old problem, scientists from the Universities of California and Kentucky took their inspiration from reports written in the first half of the twentieth century (sadly not available online) that describe the use of bean leaves (in Eastern Europe) to trap bed bugs so that they can then be destroyed.

One of the classic meals in Ryan’s family is bean feast. Ryan’s parents serve it occasionally when we visit, and Ryan’s mum kindly brought us over a bean feast when we moved into the house, to tide us over the first couple of days when we didn’t have the energy to cook. (It is the only time anyone has ever brought me food like that!)

Last year I thought I’d planted climbing French beans in the garden, and was later disappointed to find out that I’d sown a dwarf variety! This year I rectified that issue and sowed two different climbing beans – Blauhilde and Helda at the beginning of June. I sowed some indoors and some directly into one of the raised beds, where my intention was that they would climb the sweetcorn (and be 2 of the 3 Sisters). That hasn’t worked out – for some reason the sweetcorn has been a complete failure, with most stems barely reach two feet tall. In the end I put up tripods for the beans instead, and they’re really getting going now.

The broad bean season is largely over now (unless you invest in the new autumn-cropping variety, Luz de Otono), but every time I pod my beans I ponder how much waste is going straight onto the compost heap. Broad beans have to be some of the best packaged seeds in the plant world, with a thick pod filled with fluffy wadding.

Welcome to Gardeners Off World! The big news for Seed Guardians of the Galaxy this week is that the apple pips Tim Peake took to space during his Principia mission to the International Space Station (ISS) have been nurtured into saplings that have just been assigned their forever homes.

This is one of a series of posts looking at what we might eat on Mars, where most food would have to be shelf-stable, tinned or freeze-dried. You can find other posts on this topic under the Martian Meals tag.

In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks to Mission Specialist Susan Young. Susan’s new book, “Growing Beans: A Diet for Healthy People and Planet” aims to get us to look beyond green beans, as growing and eating shelled beans – fresh and dried – has numerous benefits for us and our home planet.