Thursday 1 December 2011

Beans, beans and more beans

Warning - this is a trial!

We bought one packet of Asd* soup beans [other supermarkets are available] and sowed them in land turned over just once, that hadn't been used for growing for years.

We sowed half in each 80cm wide row, which was about 10m long. 

This was the week before the end of last year's summer term; so about mid July.

We started harvesting them in October; and didn't harvest them all [I'd estimate about 2/3 of them were harvested] the rest were lost due to wet weather the pods got too wet to deal with without a workshop to lay them all out to dry.

So - the stats. We sowed 500g of seeds, and got out 5490g - a very good increase in yield of over ten times the amount we put in. Also, a fair amount of the soup beans were not beans, but green lentils, and peas; so an even better yield for the beans that grew well.

We are having half each, as I bought the seeds - I am putting them into jars for presents and the school will be doing the same for their Christmas Fayre.

All in all, a complete success.





2 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice idea. Presumably they were all dwarf varieties(?).

Zazen999 said...

Well, we didn't know for sure. A few started to climb so I stuck a cane in for them to grab hold of. But mainly dwarfs. A good experiment for us.