7 Reasons You Should Grow Beans

Time to plant some beans in many parts of the Southwest. Even if you have no interest in a “vegetable garden,” you should still consider planting some beans, and here are my seven reasons.

(Note that I said time is now for much of the Southwest. In climates cooler than USDA 7, like Reno or Santa Fe, you are going to have to wait – but that doesn’t mean you can’t pick out which ones you want to plant now.)

Reason 1.  Beans Help Your Soil When They Grow

Beans are in the Legume family. Legumes are nitrogen-fixing. This means that they take nitrogen out of the air and put it into the soil while they grow. They basically take air and make fertilizer. How cool is that!

Reason 2. Perfect set-it-and-forget-it Plant

I love beans in the garden – or in a container – because they have pretty green leaves. Few pests bother them. Some species have gorgeous flowers.

Beans grow easily without fussing around or fertilizing like corn or squash. Or gardenias or petunias! Just plant them and let them do their thing. They will like something to climb – but that can be a good thing. If you plant them in a pot, they will grow up the pole and leave some room for you to tuck in some pretty portulaca (also called marvelous moss-rose) flowers around the base. Less fussing than geraniums!

Reason 3. Easy-to-Grow & Harvest

Growing beans to dry (also called “shell”) is ridiculously easy. For dry beans, you can dry them right on the vine, so you don’t need to go out and pick them every day. Just let your beans grow and dry; you really only need to mess with them at the end of the season. This is different than most crops! Usually, you don’t want to let a vegetable ripen all the way on the plant, because that signals to the plant to stop producing. (It’s why we dead-head old flowers too – to encourage new ones.) Dry beans do not have that automatic re-flower braking system.

Note, you can harvest as the season goes on – but you do not need to.

More Vegetable Garden Help

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From the review:

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Reason 4. Beans Are Good for You

Beans are a nutritionally dense food that’s inexpensive to grow. The USDA says that they are full of B vitamins as well as loaded with fiber. As most people know – they are also full of protein.

Health Nerd Notes

Some people can eat some species of beans but have violent food allergies to other species, kidney and soy being two more problematic species. This is because “beans” are all legumes, (in the same family) but they come from many different genera. The five most commonly grown genera are Vigna, Vicia, Cicer, Phaseolus, and Glycine.

Different bean species have evolved in different areas of the globe and have different chemicals in them to keep “bugs” from eating them. You may have an allergic response to some of these chemicals but not others, althought the most common problem is with the lectins found in all species.

Cook all beans properly, as is noted in this Bean Safety post on Savor The Southwest.

Reason 5. Home-grown Dried Beans Cook Faster and Taste Better

Dry beans from the store are further dried to make them longer lasting in storage. So yes – they will take a long time to cook. Home grown are a different story. Unless you have an industrial vacuum pump to dessicate them, your home-grown dried beans cook quicker than store bought beans.

IMHO, home-grown beans also have better flavor and texture than any bean that came out of a plastic bag or can from the supermarket.

Reason 6. You Only Need to Buy Bean Seeds Once

Once you buy a packet of beans seeds to grow for dry beans you are not only growing food to eat, but you’re growing next year’s seeds as well! Just remember to save for the next growing season.

Reason 7. Food Security

Once beans are dry, they can be stored for five years before they lose vitality and flavor. (Which makes me wonder about the ones in the supermarket.) Plus, you are growing your own seeds for next year.

So the best reason to grow dry beans is all of the above reasons rolled up into one. If food security has ever been a concern, dried beans are the best crop to grow. They’re easy to grow and don’t take up much space.  Plus they last forever and sustain you nutritionally.

Which Beans to Grow?

That will be the topic for next week.  The best ones to grow in our low humidity are a number of native species.  There are also a number of native Southwestern beans to forage.  Foraging is on Savor the Southwest (but foraging beans is not up yet).

Thanks for reading –

Jacqueline

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