Harvesting Dragon Tongue Beans

Today I went out to the garden at about 7 pm.  There was a nice south breeze blowing and it made for a nice late afternoon to be in the garden.  I looked down the rows and saw that it was time to harvest our Dragon Tongue Beans.

Dragon Tongue Beans

Dragon Tongue beans are one of the items that we tried a few years back and enjoyed them and kept them in the rotation.  They are an open-pollintated, wax type, bush bean variety from the Netherlands.  They are prolific producers of delicous beans.  The bean and pod can both be steamed and eaten like any other green bean.  They can also be eaten raw or pickled.


Small bush-type plants produce large quantities of beans

The pod itself is cream - colored, with purple stripes.  Who knows how they got to be called Dragon Tongue Beans.  If I had to guess, someone with an active imagination probably figured if there were actually dragons, they would have tongues that looked like these beans.  When you cook them, the purple stripes disappear, unfortunately.  The pod itself is pretty big, as you can see as compared to my hand.


The coloration/size of a Dragon Tongue Bean

Here is another one that caught my eye in which the pod was almost completely purple.


Purple Dragon Tongue Bean

 I picked a colander full of beans and washed them up real good.  Russ sat at the island and snapped off both ends and began to string them.


Washed Dragon Tongues

We'll be enjoying these beans this week.  If our harvest exceeds our ability to eat them all, we'll blanche and freeze them in quart-sized bags, so that we can enjoy them for months and months.