Bringing Beans Back: Diversifying Our Staple Foods

If you were to purchase heirloom beans in packets labeled as “seeds” (which is almost certainly the way you would encounter the particular varieties we grow apart from our Bean Bundles, as they are virtually absent from our dominant food culture), you would be hard-pressed to source a quantity large enough to eat as a staple part of your diet. It’s conceivable that you might be able to cobble together 15-30 seeds from a small seed company here or there at a cost of about $5-10 a packet. That said, the seeds may travel from a different climate region outside of the Northeast, having not been recently grown in our local conditions and soil (even for some varieties native to this region).

Take, for example, the Fliederfarben Cranberry pole bean. Fliederfarbens are difficult to source anywhere in quantities larger than about 20 seeds. The beans are marvelous in color, superior in taste, and grow prolifically in our region. Yet, you are unlikely to find these purple gems in a grocery store near you any time soon, as pole beans don’t lend themselves to industrialized food production; they are all but impossible to cultivate and harvest using tractors, unlike bush beans. Harvesting by hand is labor-intensive and incredibly gratifying, though only one of those two qualities is well-represented on a conventional balance sheet.

Fliederfarben Cranberry beans from last season’s harvest.

At Little Bean Farm we are interested in building the genetic diversity of food crops grown in our bioregion through seed saving. For that reason, we are growing pole beans/seeds at two different scales each year: large quantity varieties (to be grown, saved as seed, and shared with the community) and small quantity varieties (to be saved as seed exclusively until we have a large quantity to share).

Last year, we grew 15 Fliederfarben seeds provided to us through the peer-to-peer network Seed Savers Exchange, half of whose tender sprouts were enjoyed by our resident groundhog neighbor. This year, we will plant the three ounces we harvested. In two to three years, we will have a large enough seed supply to grow this variety as a staple crop and will sell it as we would any other variety.

So, when you eat a pound of beans we have grown, you are enjoying the fruits of several years’ efforts to make common what is at the moment rare and hard to source. As is the case with our current crisis of biodiversity, if we do not seek to preserve what is already fading into obscurity, it may be all too easily lost.

Sure, we could sell seeds– and it might be wise to do so, given the profit margins– yet we would prefer to live in a community where Fliederfarben beans are enjoyed without fanfare in Tuesday evening burritos and as breakfast scrambles on toast, the extraordinary and rare having been made ordinary and familiar once again.