Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste. Bill Best
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interests and farm stores, especially those managed by co-ops, which started selling half-runner bean seeds. For many years the seeds were of fairly high quality, and many gardeners stopped saving their own half-runner seeds, assuming that the commercial seed beans would continue to be of high quality.
However, as seed production became more centralized with fewer growers growing seeds for fewer companies, half-runners were contaminated by the tough gene that had been introduced into commercial bush beans so that they would not break during mechanical harvest. As a result, gardeners are having to discard more than half of their beans because the beans are too tough to be edible. I have been told by several farmers’ market customers that they stopped buying half-runner beans when they had to throw away more than half of them.
Fortunately, there are still several heirloom half-runner varieties in isolated locations, and many gardeners have sought them out and have started saving their seeds once again. I was given some half-runner seeds by a friend a few years ago. As is true of many heirloom varieties, this bean was a three-in-one bean, having three distinct half-runner variants. I have spent the past ten years stabilizing one of the variants, which I call the NT Half-Runner (NT standing for “non-tough”). I still have the other two variants to go but hope to stabilize them as well.
One of my friends has refused to give up on the commercial half-runner and patiently removes each of the tough beans when they first come up. He says that the tough beans have a slightly different leaf structure and can be pulled up easily soon after they emerge from the soil. I hope he starts saving seeds from the beans he does not pull up; he might bring that particular half-runner back to its original form.
Greasy Beans
Greasy beans are usually thought of as being the best of Appalachian heirloom beans. The fact that they command prices far higher than commercially grown beans attests to their popularity: indeed, they bring up to seven times as much per pound as commercial bush beans, which are typically picked at a very immature stage by machine. Such commercial beans, if allowed to form even very small seeds, are usually too tough to eat.
Greasy beans, as mentioned earlier, are so named because they have slick hulls that look as if they have a thin coat of grease on them, and they are exceptionally tender and tasty. Even when they are fully mature and have turned yellow, they can be strung and broken easily. They are excellent when eaten fresh and are in high demand when made into shuck beans.
Greasy beans are not a variety of bean but a type. The many varieties of greasy beans come in many colors and many lengths: there are those only two to three inches long and others six to eight inches long. Most of the shorter ones seem to be cut-shorts, while the longer ones have wider spaces between the beans without the beans even touching. All greasy bean hulls are so thin that when held up to the sun, the beans inside are quite visible.
Cut-Shorts
When Appalachian heirloom beans are discussed, the term cut-short often causes confusion, leading many people to call them “short-cuts” instead. Others think that cut-shorts and greasy beans are one and the same, but the term cut-short simply describes what has happened in the hull as the bean grows: the beans grow large in proportion to the hull and tend to square off on the ends.
As cut-shorts dry on the vine prior to being saved for seed, another interesting thing sometimes occurs. After becoming partially dry on the vines, if a sprinkle of rain comes (or even just a heavy dew), the beans can swell up and break the hull open. Because of this, some traditional growers call cut-short beans “bust-out” beans instead. Whenever someone asks me if I know about bust-out beans, I know they are talking about cut-shorts.
Fall Beans or October Beans
The terms fall beans and October beans are typically used interchangeably. I will use fall beans in this discussion.
To ensure a full complement of beans for eating fresh and for preserving for later use, many, if not most, traditional gardeners plant a row or two of fall beans in addition to their other cornfield beans. Fall beans are typically larger in the hulls than other beans are, and the beans are often stringless (most other heirloom cornfield beans are not stringless). Fall beans also lag some two weeks or even longer behind most other beans in maturing: this late maturity is how they came to be known as fall beans.
While the hulls of fall beans are somewhat tougher than other cornfield beans, most are usually tender enough to be eaten with the mature bean seeds just as one would eat green beans. However, if they are to be eaten fresh, most people shell them out at the “shelly” stage (before they have dried) and prepare them as soup beans. Since the advent of refrigeration, many people also freeze them and put them in airtight containers for eating later.
Other fall bean enthusiasts allow their beans to dry on the vine and then shell them out as dry beans to be eaten in much the same way as one would eat pinto beans, cranberry beans, or commercial horticultural beans. Of course, it is best to rehydrate them by soaking them in water for several hours before cooking them. The advantage of eating or freezing them at the shelly stage is that then they do not have to be rehydrated. In addition, most growers believe that they have a better flavor and texture at that stage.
Fall beans come in many colors, from solid white to solid black and all colors of the rainbow. Some are speckled, some are striped, and some contain both speckles and stripes. Some fall beans are named after their interesting color patterns. One example of this is the Baby Face fall bean, with a pattern that looks like the face of a baby; a friend of mine found this variety for me while he was traveling in southeastern Kentucky a few years ago.
Many fall beans are stringless, but a few have strings. Their seeds are typically rounder than those of most other beans. Some have eye colors different from the rest of the bean. Most are climbing beans, but a few are bush beans. Those that are bush beans tend to be stringless, but there are exceptions to this rule as well.
Pink Tip Beans
Pink tip beans have a pink tip on the blossom end when they become nearly mature. As the seeds become fully sized, the pink tip becomes very obvious and a sign that the bean is ready to be picked from the vine and eaten fresh, canned, or dried.
East Tennessee seems to have more pink tip beans than other parts of the Southern Appalachians. For two years running (2004 and 2005) I attended the Farm Expo in Kingsport, which features farm machinery, grafting demonstrations, a host of craft and food exhibits, many types of 4-H and Future Farmers of America (FFA) projects, talks and demonstrations by agricultural experts, and a lot of entertainment. I attended as an heirloom seed collector and seller.
I also did a lot of trading of beans with many of the old-time gardeners who showed up both years. (When they saw my beans, they brought theirs to the Expo the following day.) I had grown up with my mother’s white-seeded pink tip beans, but there were many varieties of pink tip beans that I had never seen before, with most of them being brown-seeded instead of white. When I later grew them out, I came to realize that most were much larger than the white-seeded varieties I already knew about.
I also became aware about that time of a variety of greasy beans that has a pink tip. A gardener from my home county sent me some pink tip greasy beans that I found to be quite good. They were about two weeks later than most other greasy beans, and the pink tip appeared just as they reached complete maturity, a day or so before the green hulls began to turn yellow and at a time they needed to be picked unless they were to be kept for seed.
Stringless and Three-String Beans
I rarely have anyone ask about a stringless heirloom bean, since most people have such a preference for string beans. Stringless beans tend to have a tougher hull than string beans do, which means that they have to be picked earlier,