One Seed

Packs of bean seeds are landing in the hands of growers, and they all say the same thing: ORCA BEANS Plant around Mother's Day. Today is April 20, a full THREE WEEKS before Mother's Day.  And what did I do this weekend? Yes, I did that But first... I had to prepare the growing space.  The native soil at Haiku Farm is glacial till, which is, essentially, gravel.  My first garden here was dismal. (no photo.  too pathetic.) However, we have poultry, goats, and a horse--and all of the winter stall cleanings from our barn get dumped directly into the gardens.   After 16 years of doing this, we have to dig at least two feet down to find the gravel.  The soil in my garden now is soft, fluffy, and eager to grow stuff...which includes weeds. I pulled three entire wheelbarrows of weeds out of my bean-growing space If your weeds are buttercup, bindweed, ivy, or any other noxious or invasive, do not  compost them or feed them to poultry or livestock.  Pu...

Growing food is great--but only if you and your family will eat it. An "Orca" bean soaked in water and salt for a few hours (left) and a dry bean (right) I mean, beans pretty reliably taste like beans , but I decided to make sure that growing heaps of Orca beans would result in food we wanted on the table all winter.  The complication is, as I mentioned in an earlier post, that not all beans sold as "Orca" beans are actually Orca beans.  Some are Calypso, some are Ying/Yang.  Sigh . I bought a 5-pound bag of "Orca" beans from  Central Bean  in Quincy WA so I could do a taste-test. I did the best I could.  The beans I bought to eat are either Orca, or something very similar to Orca. This was not a scientific test, by the way.  There are thousands of ways to eat beans, with recipes from all over the world--that's one reason I want to grow them!   But I   wanted to taste-test these in soup, because that's how we mostly eat them in my h...

 Aren't they beautiful? These Orca beans were donated by Dr. Carol Miles, a horticultural researcher at the WSU facility in Mt. Vernon, WA Our donated beans date from a WSU research project in 2018.  The goal of the project was to determine if "soup beans" (as opposed to "green beans") would be a viable niche market crop for Western Washington farmers.   The short answer is "yes." The longer answer is HERE . This project trialed several varieties of soup bean to determine which (if any) were a good match for Western Washington growing conditions. Although the research was focused on dry beans, the researchers got curious about which (if any) varieties also made good food at the "green" stage.   The clear winner was Orca. PLEASE NOTE:  Several seed companies call all their black and white beans Ying/Yang, Calypso, and Orca interchangeably.  However, those beans are not necessarily the same thing.  Dr. Miles told me that she communic...