we finally had enough to pick yesterday to cook up and try out.
first of all these are a bush bean, upright habit, beans are fairly far off the ground (higher than most other bush beans i grow), bright purple flowers, red stems and darker leaves, dark purple beans (easy to see to pick), they flower heavily and bear pretty well based upon last year's first grow of the seeds. and early is also a good feature to make sure they can finish up the dry seeds before it gets into the fall cooler and rainy weather here.
last year i sampled a few when fresh to see if they were good as a fresh/snap bean and they were very tender, sweet and mild. so the plan for this year was to grow a lot of them to see if they were as good as those few beans indicated.
these were originally marked as a dry bean, but now we're very happy eating them fresh too.
when i can hand one to Mom and she'll eat it fresh and say "Yummy!" we probably have a keeper.
when i cooked them up yesterday i nuked them for
8 minutes and they were perfect. a regular batch of green and wax beans may go from 13-15 minutes.the downside to these beans is if you have Japanese Beetles around they can be a magnet crop for attracting them. i just pick the bugs off a few times a week in the morning.
aside from the JB attractant trait the rest of the traits of this bean are ones i am glad to have in my mix of beans that i grow so i will continue to grow these each season and plan on having fun watching some new crosses appear.
i have not yet had enough dry seeds to cook them up as a dry bean, but perhaps this fall there will be enough for that. they did bear very well last year for just the few plants i had growing.
the seeds are also attractive.
songbird