Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste. Bill Best
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Fall beans come in many colors, from solid white to solid black and all colors of the rainbow. Some are speckled, some are striped, and some contain both speckles and stripes. Some fall beans are named after their interesting color patterns. One example of this is the Baby Face fall bean, with a pattern that looks like the face of a baby; a friend of mine found this variety for me while he was traveling in southeastern Kentucky a few years ago.
Many fall beans are stringless, but a few have strings. Their seeds are typically rounder than those of most other beans. Some have eye colors different from the rest of the bean. Most are climbing beans, but a few are bush beans. Those that are bush beans tend to be stringless, but there are exceptions to this rule as well.
Pink Tip Beans
Pink tip beans have a pink tip on the blossom end when they become nearly mature. As the seeds become fully sized, the pink tip becomes very obvious and a sign that the bean is ready to be picked from the vine and eaten fresh, canned, or dried.
East Tennessee seems to have more pink tip beans than other parts of the Southern Appalachians. For two years running (2004 and 2005) I attended the Farm Expo in Kingsport, which features farm machinery, grafting demonstrations, a host of craft and food exhibits, many types of 4-H and Future Farmers of America (FFA) projects, talks and demonstrations by agricultural experts, and a lot of entertainment. I attended as an heirloom seed collector and seller.
I also did a lot of trading of beans with many of the old-time gardeners who showed up both years. (When they saw my beans, they brought theirs to the Expo the following day.) I had grown up with my mother’s white-seeded pink tip beans, but there were many varieties of pink tip beans that I had never seen before, with most of them being brown-seeded instead of white. When I later grew them out, I came to realize that most were much larger than the white-seeded varieties I already knew about.
I also became aware about that time of a variety of greasy beans that has a pink tip. A gardener from my home county sent me some pink tip greasy beans that I found to be quite good. They were about two weeks later than most other greasy beans, and the pink tip appeared just as they reached complete maturity, a day or so before the green hulls began to turn yellow and at a time they needed to be picked unless they were to be kept for seed.
Stringless and Three-String Beans
I rarely have anyone ask about a stringless heirloom bean, since most people have such a preference for string beans. Stringless beans tend to have a tougher hull than string beans do, which means that they have to be picked earlier, before the seed matures. However, many, if not most, fall beans are stringless. And while their hulls are somewhat tougher than those of string beans, many people still break them and eat them as green beans. The beans separate readily from the hulls during the cooking process because the beans are so large in proportion to the hulls.
Some varieties of beans have three strings, one on the outer side and two on the inner side of the bean. (The inside of the bean is the side within the curl that almost all heirloom beans have.) The two strings on the inner side of three-string beans are side by side, each “zipping” its own half of the bean pod, and the two strings peel off easily together.
Wax Beans
Although wax beans are not widely grown in the mountains, many gardeners keep at least one variety. Wax beans are pale, from yellow to almost white. Some people use them in three-bean salads, and some cook them for use in the same way as green beans. They range from very thin hulls to exceptionally thick hulls and tend to have a less “beany” flavor than do green beans or purple-hulled beans (which turn green when cooked).
Butter Beans
Many Appalachian gardeners also keep at least one variety of butter bean, ranging from white to deep purple in color. Many are striped or speckled. They do not cross with green beans or wax beans, but they do cross readily with one another. Their hulls are not eaten, and they are much later than green beans in maturing, sometimes taking 120 days, so they must be planted early to ensure that they reach maturity before frost. I do not know of any heirloom bush butter bean grown in the Southern Appalachians; the heirloom varieties require cornstalks, poles, or trellises to yield effectively. They can be shelled prior to the hulls becoming dry as shelly beans and may be eaten without having to be rehydrated, but most people tend to eat them as dry beans because they store well.
Butter beans often come with stories attached. One Kentucky gardener has butter beans that can be traced back to the end of the Civil War. His great-grandfather was near New Orleans at the end of the war and had to walk back to Kentucky. Whenever he passed a garden where butter beans were being grown, he would collect some of them, and he ended up with an amazing array of colors. In retirement, Joe Richards keeps growing them at his home in Somerset, Kentucky.
Types of Heirloom Beans in Tennessee
John Coykendall, master gardener for the Blackberry Farm Resort, has long experimented with heirloom and heritage vegetable seeds. In the following two sections he discusses the many old-time bean varieties he has collected.
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Collecting Beans in Tennessee
John Coykendall
During the years that I have been collecting beans in Tennessee, it soon became evident that the vast majority of old varieties to be found were in rural counties in or near the Smoky Mountains region of East Tennessee.
It was in isolated coves and hollows that I found most of the old bean varieties that I collected. Families in these regions had saved their own unique varieties down through the years. Often these old varieties had special characteristics that had developed over time, through selection and isolation.
There were beans for each growing season; some tolerated early spring planting when the soil was still cold, while others were grown during the hot summer months, and these included stick beans, pole beans, and cornfield beans, which were somewhat shade tolerant and suited for growing in cornfields. There were also a number of fall or October beans that thrive during late summer and early fall.
Most people are familiar with the dry shell types of horticultural beans, which have tough hulls at all stages of development. Not many people, however, are aware that there are a number of tender-hull October bean varieties that were once commonly grown.
I have five different October beans in my collection that come from Campbell and Greene Counties here in East Tennessee. With the tender-hull October beans you had a multipurpose bean; they were good to use at all stages of development, including fresh shell beans. In late fall the dried pods were gathered and shelled out to be used as dry beans during the winter.
One of my earliest memories of beans was “leather britches.” I remember seeing them hanging on long strings from rafter poles, on the front porches of farmhouses, or from nails on the walls of back porches. I especially remember a neighbor lady in a calico dress with a large apron and wearing a split bonnet. She was sitting on the front porch of her cabin stringing up green beans to be dried for winter use.
Today a few people still string up leather britches, although the necessity of doing so is long past. For some it is a part of a nostalgic tradition that is still being carried on. Perhaps for many it is carrying on what they remember their parents and grandparents doing. For others it may be the unique old-time flavor that awakens memories from long ago. For me leather britches represent a celebration of our culinary traditions, along with history, heritage, and a way of life that is unique to our mountain region.
As seed savers we are not only preserving