Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste. Bill Best
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This bean is very popular within about a hundred-mile radius of Cumberland Gap (where Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee meet). Turkey Craw Beans are especially popular from there to Kingsport, Tennessee, and throughout Lee County, Virginia, and Harlan and Letcher Counties in Kentucky. Most sources have the variety originating in southeastern Kentucky, but no one knows for sure.
Still another regional bean is the Paterge (Partridge) Head Bean in Albany, Kentucky, and Byrdstown, Tennessee, as well as surrounding areas. It is a large bean in comparison to the size of the hull and is good both as a green bean and for shelly and dried beans. It is a light brown color with darker stripes and grows to be about six inches long.
The Big John Bean is well known in the Knott/Perry/Letcher/Harlan County areas of southeastern Kentucky and is also in high demand among natives of the area who have migrated to Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and elsewhere in the north. The prices of such beans sometimes climb to $70.00 per bushel on the side of the road on summer Sunday afternoons in July and August when those heading back to their homes in other states stop to buy beans for eating fresh, canning, and drying. At the same time, some of the best strains of the Big John are grown in those same northern states by people who took their seeds with them when they migrated.
Other regional beans include the Logan Giant in southwestern West Virginia and the Mountain Climber in northwestern North Carolina and upper East Tennessee. Of course, there are several greasy beans that have been made very popular by the Western North Carolina Farmers Market in Asheville; many of those bean varieties originated in Madison County, North Carolina, but have become so popular that they are now grown in adjoining counties.
These well-known regional beans are probably among the oldest of the heirloom beans in the Southern Appalachians and have been around for generations, while those originating more recently from crosses or mutants, though no less tender or tasty, have not had time to spread much beyond where they originated, despite the mobility of our modern society. Contrary to the dominant academic opinion that the people of the Appalachians lived in geographic isolation, mountain folk did a lot of traveling and a lot of trading along the way, long before the advent of a cash economy and motorized transportation. It was nothing to take a trip of several hundred miles and be gone two or three months or longer at one time.
Two groups of widely traveled people, politicians and preachers, are given much of the credit for the early spreading of bean varieties, and there are several varieties of preacher beans (although I do not know of any being called “politician beans”). Appalachian scholar, storyteller, and humorist Loyal Jones tells a story that might explain the dissemination of many bean varieties in western North Carolina via politics:
Zebulon Vance, Civil War governor of North Carolina and later senator, as good a politician as there was, knew the importance of beans, and he used them in his political campaigns: He’d have his wife tie up a few seed beans in a packet, and when he went through the counties campaigning, stopping at houses along the way, he’d say to the woman of the house, “My wife wanted you to have some of her Lazy Wife beans, and she wondered if you could give her a few of your Goose Craw beans.” The woman would dutifully tie up a few of her beans, and he would take them to the next house and say, “My wife wanted you to have some of her Goose Craw beans. . .” And so on.
Trade was another mechanism for spreading bean varieties. For example, people going on periodic trips from the mountains to the coast to boil down seawater for salt might have taken beans with them to trade along their routes. I remember as a small child hearing some of the oldest men in the community where I grew up talking about their trips to the ocean to boil down salt. One might then say that a good collector of regional beans would be worth his salt. (An old saying in the mountains holds that someone who is motivated and productive is worth his salt or, if he is nonproductive or lazy, isn’t worth his salt.)
Some of the sons and even a few daughters from large Appalachian families became migrant farmworkers during the summers in the early decades of the twentieth century. They traveled on freight trains to Georgia or Florida and followed the harvest from there northward to Pennsylvania and New Jersey and then came back home to the mountains when the harvest was finished. At times, young couples would go work together as migrants and sometimes decide to stay on one of the farms where they did harvesting work. Some, including couples from my home community, made enough money to buy farms of their own in other states. Long before farmers became dependent on migrants from Mexico and other countries, there were sufficient internal migrants to take care of farm labor needs in the United States. My father was one such migrant for many years, spending a lot of time in the summers in New Jersey when it truly was the “Garden State.”
Types of Appalachian Heirloom Beans
Cornfield Beans
For some decades, many farm and hardware stores in the mountains have sold bean seeds labeled as “Genuine Cornfield Beans.” Such a label is merely a marketing ploy to attract those with little knowledge about beans, or as one might say, to attract buyers who “don’t know beans about beans.”
It is safe to say that well over 95 percent of Appalachian heirloom beans are genuine cornfield beans. This simply means that they are climbing beans, for which cornstalks historically served as poles for the beans to climb. Some of my most vivid early childhood memories involve going to our cornfields with my mother to pick the beans from the cornstalks when they were at their peak for canning and drying. I thought that the cornfield must be the closest thing imaginable to a jungle. I was fascinated by the many colors of bean hulls and the multicolored beans within them as well.
As hybrid varieties of corn with their shorter and weaker stalks entered the picture, many gardeners started using poles on which to grow their beans, often in teepee style to stabilize them during windy weather. Others would cut tree branches with many twigs to create a bean vine that looked something like a large fan; the bean would continue to send out new vines and be very productive over a long season. Cornfield beans thus became pole beans.
But not all gardeners switched over to poles to support their beans. Many still think that the older open-pollinated corn varieties with their taller and stronger stalks are the best supports for climbing beans. Many gardeners maintain their stock of open-pollinated corn for beans to climb and also for grinding into cornmeal, because in many areas hybrid corn is thought to produce inferior-flavored cornmeal. A popular open-pollinated corn still sold in farm stores is the Hickory Cane (sometimes called Hickory King) or Eight Row variety.
Many growers now grow their climbing beans on trellises supported by strong posts and wires. This is especially true for those growers who grow heirloom beans for farmers’ markets, which are springing up throughout the Appalachian region. Such trellises allow for the greatest amount of sunlight on the leaves of the beans and for drip irrigation, which has greatly assisted bean growth during the dry summers of the past few years. Some gardeners also use concrete-reinforcing wire stacked two rolls high and supported by steel posts to create strong trellises. Trellises are becoming increasingly popular with growers, and climbing beans might someday be called “trellis beans” as a more accurate descriptive name.
Runner and Half-Runner Beans
I am often asked this question: “What is the difference between a half-runner and a full runner bean?” My reply is, “About ten feet.” The answer is actually more complex, since running beans have runners of many heights. The Peanut Bean, also known as the Pink Half-Runner and sometimes as the Six Week Bean, has runners about three feet long. Some growers contend that the true Peanut Bean has no runners at all, but I have never seen one that completely lacked runners.
Other beans, commonly known as “half-runners,” have runners up to at least ten feet. Full runner beans have probably never been accurately measured. I have experimented with bean posts sixteen feet tall on which the bean vines went all the way to the top and back down partway, limited only by the end of the growing season. I have also had running beans, under optimal temperature and moisture conditions, grow more than a foot per day, by actual measurement. As some people have said, “Watch out or they will run over you.” But they are not quite like kudzu.
For many years, white half-runners were the dominant bean in many areas of the mountains. This development did not escape notice