Growing Frijoles Negros

To this day beans and rice is a favorite meal of mine.  It's such a simple dish, but so filling, healthy and satisfying!  As a youngster, my favorite was Red Beans & Rice and sausage with cornbread on the side. Before you served the beans over rice, it was very important that you would mash up a bunch of the beans.  This thickens the dish and makes what I call a bean "gravy" or roux. 

You might say that beans are beans, but my Mom and everyone I knew were partial toward a specific brand of Red Beans and bought them with the sort of brand loyalty that you would thing only exists with diehard Chevy or Ford folks.  Camellia Red Kidney Beans.  They came wrapped in a clear cellophane bag so that you could inspect every perfect, shiny red kidney bean inside the bag.  

At one point I was going to attempt to try to grow our own red kidney beans.  Up to this point, I haven't done it, but if I might buy some Camellia Red beans and see if they'll germinate.  For the past several years, though, I've planted Black Beans.  They are called Black Turtle Beans, to be specific.  Black Beans or frijoles negros are a special dish in Latin America and Mexico.  Mainly, Tricia cooks them like you would refried beans.  As a treat, we put the refried black beans in a fresh flour tortilla, fold and eat.  It's a simple, tasty meal.

So let's go out to the garden, where our black beans are slowly ripening.  I only have one row of them and the dry, dry month of October is not doing the yield any favors, but my goal is to grow them and watch them closely as they mature.

The black beans have lots of pods, and they are ripening.  My goal is to allow them to mostly ripen on the stalk until they are almost totally dry and the pods have turned yellowish-brown.  You don't want the pods to get dry and crack open, though, as you'll lose the beans when the pop onto the ground.

Each day I check the beans and pick those that have dried.  I carry them to our fancy black bean dryer apparatus for the finishing touches on drying.  I lay them in the sun on our expanded metal patio table.  The sun completes the drying process and the table allows maximum air flow.

When the pods are dry and 'crinkly' to the touch, we pop open the pods and collect the black beans in a bowl.  We just started the harvesting process and have a lot left to go, but here's what we have so far.

We'll eat most everything we pick but will save some for planting for next year.  The Black Turtle Beans I buy are non-hybrid and come from rareseeds.com, so they are perfect for seed saving.  Perhaps 2025 is the year that I'll grow Red Beans!

Our First Try At Growing Black Beans

Tricia likes to cook Black Beans.  In Spanish they are called frijoles negros.  I have also seen them called black turtle beans.  Tricia makes refried beans with them.  We always buy dried black beans to soak and then cook and so I thought, "What the heck?  Let's grow some."  I purchased a package of seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (rareseeds.com) and since they are open pollinated seeds, I'll save a few to replant next year.

The heat of summer is upon us and repeated rainfall has really played a number on the black beans since they are planted on the lower end of the garden.  They look kind of sickly in spots, but they are full of pods.

Since I have never grown them before, I did a little research on when to harvest them.  I actually opened up a green pod to see what they look like and oddly, they weren't black yet.  I read that you don't want to harvest them when the pods are green as they aren't ripe yet.

You also don't want to harvest them when they turn pale yellow either.

You really want to wait until they are dried and the pods are brown.  Of course, you have to time the harvest perfectly, because if they get too dry, the pods will burst open and your black beans will scatter all over the ground.

The other problem with waiting for them to dry on the stalk is that with our amount of yearly rainfall, leaving them in the pods to ripen exposes them to the risk of sprouting in the pod if it stays wet.  With more rainfall approaching, I figured that I should harvest now so as not to risk losing the crop.  I went out and pulled the mostly ripened dry pods off the plants.

I sat in front of the television tonight and shelled a bowl full of beautiful black beans.  Some of the beans were sprouted, but most were perfect.  I'll let them dry for a bit and then we'll cook them up.

There are plenty green pods still on the plant, so I'll check for ripeness in a week and harvest more of them  It will be nice to eat some, put some dried black beans in the pantry and save some for planting this fall and again next spring.