So far the bean pods we've collected have contained no more than six beans each, with an unscientific average of about four per pod. Maybe next year I can be more precise, but I'd better get a huge grant to compensate for that amount of boredom. Yesterday, however, one pod revealed seven beans. Another held eight beans. Two record-breakers in one harvest! Take that, Jack!
As the plants have matured, they seem to get a little longer and fuller. I'm saving the ones from pods five inches or longer, although their bean yield is from three to six. (It ain't the size of the pod but the the number of beans in the pod that makes you a pot of beans!) Pintos with five or six seeds and pods of 5 inches or longer outnumber the Anasazis by 90%, at least in the picture below. But Anasazis are so much prettier, and you might say they are more dependable averaging 4 bpp [beans per pod]).
By the way, I can't tell by the pod what color the beans are going to be inside. When the beans are cooked, I can't tell the difference by taste or sight either. Another bit of trivia is how cool it is when you split open the pod and see how they break on opposite sides, and they fit back together like a puzzle (the purply Anasazi bean to the far left, above, illustrates this). The ruler says, "IRVINE RECYCLES."I've been collecting single beans. And I've been noticing that usually, not always, but usually single and twin beans are bigger than beans from fuller pods. Within the fuller pods, there may be a couple or three larger beans and the beans on the ends are teeny. The octopod beans were all quite tiny. I will let you draw your own parallels to the famous Nadya.
Can you guess why I'm especially drawn to the single babies?
My son started out in public school at which, in the center of a cluster of classrooms, was a special room called the "pod." Maybe that's why the bean pods remind me of school. The fewer the number of beans in the pod, the better and bigger the beans. The more beans, the smaller their average size, and some seem to suffer from crowding. Because my brain is wired to make goofy associations while insufficiently occupied, I'm wondering if you could say that home school is like smaller pods. Give each little human bean more space and more attention and s/he will have more room to grow.
Note the size variation in these pintos.BUT it's a lot more work to shell the dried pod from a bunch of single beans and the yield is less. It is more efficient to open up one pod and spill out six smaller beans than to repeat that effort four times for the same bean weight. The plant's energy, and your water and expense, should go to making beans, not chaff. One good handful of pods fills a 16-oz. cup, but when all the wrappings are off, the actual beans hardly register on my little diet scale. [NOTE: Diet scale is used to weigh macaroni when Son makes mac'n'cheese, as he won't eat leftovers and can't finish the whole box yet. Repeat: yet.] So is a bigger bean a better bean, really? How do you tell?
I have been saving a third bean category. All the weird damaged and shrunken little beans, the ones with bug holes and the underdeveloped ones that made a bump in the pod but didn't grow to fill it. I'm going to plant them and see what happens, because they deserve a chance too. I made a judgment about a one-seater pod that had been drilled by a borer, and I thought it was too damaged to grow and certainly not worth cooking. I threw it on the compost pile and within a few days, it sprouted. So I grabbed it and stuck it at the end of the row where the broccoli is still alive but only taking up space. And here is a picture of the little bean which I had discarded.
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