Little Green Beans

These are the beginnings of the bean crop this year.  I call it a crop but really it's a whole 10 or so plants with a few beans each.  Enough to make a side dish from once they are big enough but that's about it.

We will have enough though to save some of the seeds for next year's garden.  Seed saving is the only way to get crops year after year, whether you do it yourself or buy from seed companies that only do seed saving.

Doing it yourself though has one distinct advantage over buying it year after year from a seed company.  You know how the plant is going to react where you live and there will always be small variations to a plant.  What grew is the best plant from the seeds you planted.  The beans, in this case, that grew are a snapshot of those plants.  Anything that made those specific plants grow that maybe made them a fraction better than the plants you thinned out or that didn't grow so well is preserved and passed on to next year's crop.  If you do this for long enough you will start to have a hybrid and something that, although it resembles the original plants, is not the plants you started with.  They will, hopefully,  be better.  They also might get cross pollinated from a nearby garden and come up with a whole different plant.  This happens a lot with commercial crops.  One plant will cross with another and the result isn't always what a farmer wanted.  Thus saving seeds can be a tricky matter.

Several of the seeds we have planted are from produce from the store.  This also can be fairly random since some produce is pollinated by a more fertile plant even though the fruit from that plant may not be as desirable.  Apples for instance are often cross pollinated with crabapples because they put off more pollen and help other apple trees produce better.  The fruit from the desired trees is good but the seeds may well be a cross between say a honeycrisp and crabapple.

Some things you don't want to cross.  Dill and fennel for instance will produce a plant that doesn't taste like either and doesn't smell all that good.

Five Leaf Green Bean Plant

You've heard of four leaf clovers, well I've got a five leaf green bean plant.  I'm sure it's just a clump of leaves that didn't make a new stem out of the previous leaf area but it still looks cool.

The garden currently has lots of leaves growing.  The basil has doubled in size since last week and the cilantro is growing even faster.  No need to go to the grocery store any time soon for these.

The single solitary carrot has no flowers yet but it's already five times bigger than any carrots that tried growing last year. The new leaves seem to just keep coming.

The green onion at first seemed like it might die back after the scapes were done growing and making seed but there are now even more leaves than they started with.  Lots of brown of course as the old growth gives way to the new though but that's to be expected.

The tomato plants should be making flowers any day now.  There are surely enough leaves but I plan to add a little more dirt and thin them  just a little more so there isn't so much competition for nutrients.  An of course feeding it all.  There are still inkcaps growing in the large pot.  I think the dirt was still more mulch than dirt and needs some decomposition. They're doing what they can and should be excellent next year if not by this summer.

Dried Green Beans

I know I like green beans and I know I like dried beans.  But I never thought to see if I like dried green bean seeds, which are of course dried beans.

It takes longer to get them and you can get dried beans so cheaply in the store so It's probably why I never though to grow my own.  Finding references to doing so was also not easy to come by but there are some.

So instead of taking the green beans and eating the young pods, I'm going to be patient and wait for these guys to mature and make beans.  Not sure yet if I want to make a bean soup or possibly try to do a white chili. One of our friends said they don't think they've ever had white pepper, although I'm sure they probably just didn't notice there was pepper in the food since it doesn't give it that distinct peppered look, for instance in alfredo sauce.

Any way you look at it though I was going to make sure some of them dried anyway so in the end I'll just see how many beans it makes and make sure to save enough for later planting and eat the rest.

So far it seems like you don't have to soak the beans for very long if you have to soak them at all and the flavor is supposed to be even better since they haven't really fully dried.  Hopefully I'll get a good recipe I can share later.

Edible Office Beans

The little beans have gone from cute to ready to eat, not that there enough of them right now to make a side dish.

I'm going to wait until these guys get bigger and form viable seeds though so I can replant them later.  This wasn't really for a crop of beans.  It does show though that you can grow your own vegetables in your office cubicle even if you only have room for one pot.

When I worked in Dallas I tried growing some plants in my cubicle and they did pretty good. One such plant was a sunflower.  I don't think it would have produced well but it grew nicely in the little cup I was growing it in.  They really do require full sun though to mature and make seeds.  I also had a little bonsai tree. I don't recall which variety it was but it lasted nearly a year. Lastly that was where I started my first lemon tree which lived in a pot for a good long while. You can see an old post here.

Baby Green Bean

This cute little green bean is just the start of my green bean harvest this year.  Well maybe not quite what you'd be able to call a harvest but it is at least a bean.  I hand pollinated this flower when it was just opening and apparently I did a half way ok job doing it.

There is another smaller one but it was a lot harder to take a picture of so this is the one I got.

There are a lot of flowers at the moment though so I expect there to be a lot more beans as well. hand pollinating is one way to do this.  Not sure if the gnats will do anything with the flowers or not but I really doubt it.

I was looking at the vanilla orchids as well today and I believe they are quite a bit larger than when I got them.  I still haven't taken the time to get them something big enough but light weight enough for them to climb up.  That branch is still leaning against the wall but it really is too heavy to work well at the moment.  I have to cut it up or maybe even split it so that it can be used and not be unwieldy if it needs moving.

First Open Flower

The first bean flower to actually open.  It actually isn't very well formed and it's the only one so far but at least it feels promising.  There are several others forming so eventually I should be able to hand pollinate them and get some beans before it's even very warm outside.

If nothing else the flowers are pretty.  A blast of white (not snow) in the office among all the green.

My first flower that I really tried to grow was the daylily. It was a purple and orange mix.  I tried to bring it with me but planted it in a poor spot and it didn't survive but for a few years.  I thought it had just not flowered but when I went to dig it up for moving, after we sold the house, it was gone.  We had several other daylillies in the backyard at different spots some flowering and others too shaded to do anything.  They're another plant that's easy to grow for beginning gardeners.

Starting to Look Green

My boss Art came by asking about the large branch in my cubicle.  Ok, it is a little strange to have a branch against the wall but after explaining what I was going to do with it he seemed fine.

Of course I can't leave it like it is but for the time being it's ok.  The top of my cubicle is really starting to take on a greenish hue though.  It's kinds nice to have a little green in  my area.  Especially on these cold winter days it's good to be reminded that things are still growing.  It brightens up the day.

Still need to do a little tree separation though.  One of my coworkers still hasn't brought a pot for transplanting yet but again came by and looked at the plants and was like, "Oh yeah, I need to bring a pot..."  We'll see if this actually happens or not.

The other transplanted trees, you can kind of see in the background on the left, are doing just fine still.  Better than the left pot for sure.  But I think the left pot is starting to pick up well.  Lots of little leaves coming.

The bean plants on the other hand, while they have leaves, aren't fully flowering.  The flower starts to form and then just dies off.  Maybe while I'm at Vegas it'll try again to flower and make some beans.

Flowering Beans

The green bean plants are finally flowering.  I thought it was making some flowers earlier but they turned out to be new green shoots from the main stalk.  In a day or so I should be able to pollinate the flowers and get the beans to start forming.  This one is very much a vining variety.  It keeps sprawling out. The other beans from the same packet though seem to be growing upright.  Not sure exactly what this means about my beans but so far none of my plants seem to be uniform in variety.

The mister I ordered to help out the orchids never arrived and the seller isn't responding to messages.  So it's back to the search for a mister that will help keep the humidity up for these guys.  Fortunately Amazon is probably going to get me a refund of the cost since there was a problem.  We'll see if it actually happens though, not finalized.

Thinking of planting a low ground cover in the pots at some point but not sure what to plant.  The trees of course aren't quite ready for that anyway but it's still something I want to think about and plan.  A low growing shade loving herb might be good since it's going to be indoors.  Maybe thyme or mint?  Any suggestions are welcome.

Optimal Light

Brought the little vanilla plants to the front toward the light.  I had left them behind it so that the little spider wouldn't be disturbed but they were not looking like they liked so much shade especially since they were indoors anyway.

The white things in front are the cut up bottles with water and paper towels in them.  Still having to change them out every few days so that they don't breed mold.  They already seem to be doing a little better.

In front of this, but out of the picture, is the other pot.  I raised it up too a couple feet to be closer to the light.  It went from floor to on top of two boxes to on top of a filing cabinet and two boxes.  The leaves are starting to pick up again.  It's growth had been stunted due to lack of light.

The bean plant you see in the upper right of this photo is starting to form flowers already. I should have beans in a few weeks.  Okay, maybe two or three beans but that's still more than one.

Bean leaves

Plant identification by leaf is a common practice.  There are websites out there (usually by geography) that can help identify a plant by shape, type, texture, and such of a leaf, like this one at Texas A&M.  I guess I never paid a lot of attention to the leaves of a bean plant before but the initial leaves just didn't look like a bean plant to me.

It so happens that these are primary leaves that get the plant growing quickly and don't match the rest of the leaves it will produce throughout the rest of the growing cycle.

I think I already see some leaves forming at the base of some of the leaf branches.  It won't be long before they open and start to make beans.  One of my favorite things about bean plants is that they grow so fast and you can see results without waiting too long.  The cacao, just visible on the right, takes a minimum of 4 years for fruit to form but more likely 7-8 years in these less than ideal conditions.  They are still putting out leaves though.