I mislabelled the seeds. I thought they were a bush bean. I’d only been planting bush beans and snake beans this year, because the catbird likes perching on top of the trellis and eating bean leaves.
But they grew, and grew, so I set up a dodgy teepee for them. They kept growing, two metres, three metres. I had to set up (again dodgy) staked supports to stop the teepee blowing over, and, well, this is how they ended up. The catbird, for some reason only known to its birdy mind, doesn’t like the teepee as a perch nearly as much as my vertical or arched wire trellises. So I have accidentally discovered how to grow pole beans here.
I think they are Blue Lake by the look. Old seed, and I can’t remember how they ended up in my seed box labelled Redland Pioneer – a bush bean, which they are clearly not. Blue Lakes used to be one of my standard bean varieties before the catbird moved in, so they are probably saved seed, but I haven’t planted them for years now.
The beans are nice as green beans, but I have Tendergreen and Cherokee Wax bush beans in too, and they get eaten first. So these ones will be picked as they mature and the pod yellows, to be shelled and either dried and stored or cooked fresh as a cannellini bean substitute. I have a recipe for Garlic White Bean Paste that I haven’t made for a while, and it is so good. So today I’m celebrating lucky mistakes!
Lucky mistakes are one of my favourite things about gardening.