pinto beans I have made much of my project to grow some genuine protein in my garden in the form of some humble pinto beans here at The Dirt and so it is with glowing pride that I come here to share my success. Yes folks: I have beans. So far, about a cup worth. And there may be a whole cup more out there yet to mature enough for harvest. Now I have to admit I went a bit by the seat of the proverbial pants on this one as I wasn’t quite sure how one coaxed a bean plant from green bean production to hard bean bounty, and so expert gardeners out there feel free to correct me if my methodology was wrong. I didn’t really have much of a plan for these guys beyond planting them at the very end of the season and hoping they’d produce. In the end, the plan I ended up following was one more of fate than design, namely: I went on holidays for two weeks at the end of September leaving my very mature beans on the stalk and came home to find most of the bean pods dried and when split chock full of smooth delightful pintos. Huzzah! The others out there are still a bit too moist for harvest me thinks, and so I’m letting them dry out a bit before I haul them in.

I’m not sure what to do with my cup (plus more!) of pintos, but I’m thinking it will be something special. All ideas and recipes are more than welcome. I’m also kind of feeling a bit like gardening is magic I have to admit, as I sat in my yard cracking open dried bean pods and pulling out a hearty handful of slippery, smooth beans when only weeks prior I had taken a half dozen of them and stuck them hopefully in the ground. I guess the wonderment is so strong because most of my gardening is about turning seeds into something that for my purposes doesn’t look much like a seed anymore: tiny black lettuce seeds into big leafy greens, nubbly little beet seeds into sweet magenta orbs, brown pellets into chives and so on. I don’t usually stick a seed (in this case a bean) into the ground so that I can harvest 50x its likeness. But now that I have, I have to say it really does seem like an insanely awesome project to undertake. I’m already imagining the entire East side of the house in constant bean production next summer… though I’m sure I’ll tone things down a bit when the time comes.