Harvesting & Canning Dragon Tongue Beans

Field of Beans

Beans, Beans, as far as the eye can see.  Actually, it’s just 3 twenty four foot rows of 3 different varieties: Contender, Italian Roma, and Dragon Tongue.  The beans are fading fast now, but they have produced in copious quantities, so much so that my wife groans when I bring in additional buckets of beans.  I keep reminding her that bumper crops of fresh green beans are a great problem to have.  We have eaten them cooked with fresh new potatoes, blanched and frozen them, canned them, and given lots of them away.

Today, we’ll talk about the Dragon Tongue beans.  They are a truly beautiful bean and they produce long, light yellow pods of flat beans accentuated by purple striping.  I suppose the person who named this variety had an active imagination and envisioned that if the mythical dragon did indeed exist, his or her tongue would have looked like this:

Ye Olde Dragon Tongue Beans

About 10 minutes of bending over down a row of beans with a colander, picking the ripest, freshest beans I could find, yielded me a nice little mess of beans.  I took them in and washed them in the vegetable sink.  Note to self: One of my winter projects is going to be building an outside sink to wash my hands, wash vegetables, and also wash chicken carcasses when butchering.

Washing Up the Beans

With far too many beans to eat fresh or give away, and being that we had already frozen several gallons, we decided to put some up in the pantry.  We decided to can quart-sized jars of Dragon Tongue Beans.  Being that the beans were already washed up, we trimmed the ends and boiled them for 5 minutes.  Then we packed the quart jars with hot beans, adding a little salt to each jar.  Then we poured boiling water over the beans, leaving head space of about 1 inch.

Boiling Water over beans

The unfortunate thing about Dragon Tongue Beans is that the beautiful purple stripes all disappear once the beans are heated.  Fortunately, though, the taste doesn’t disappear.  The broad, flat beans are good-eatin’.

No more stripes

After placing the lids and bands on the jar, we place all the jars in a pressure canner and process at 10 pounds pressure for 25 minutes.  Finally, we remove the jars and allow to cool, ensuring that the lids have sealed after 24 hours.

7 quarts for the pantry

And there we have it – 7 quarts of Dragon Tongue Beans ready to go into the pantry for long-term food storage.  You know, growing and storing your own food is not only fun to do, but should be a part of every home’s preparedness for weather or natural disaster.  Just this morning, I read THIS ARTICLE that said the following:

"I come here looking for food because if I didn't, I'd starve to death," Noguera said as he sorted through a pile of moldy potatoes. "With things like they are, no one helps anyone and no one gives away meals."

Across town, unemployed people converge every dusk at a trash heap on a downtown Caracas sidewalk to pick through rotten fruit and vegetables tossed out by nearby shops. They are frequently joined by small business owners, college students and pensioners — people who consider themselves middle class even though their living standards have long ago been pulverized by triple-digit inflation, food shortages and a collapsing currency.

How sad! 

"We're seeing terrible sacrifices across many sections of society," said Carlos Aponte, a sociology professor at the Central University of Venezuela. "A few years ago, Venezuela didn't have the kind of extreme poverty that would drive people to eat garbage."

We’re far from being prepared, but having a few quarts of Dragon Tongue Beans in the pantry beats digging through other people’s garbage for food to eat.

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