Friday, January 2, 2009

A hill of beans

My Christmas didn't amount to a hill of beans.
In reality, I received about 15 pounds of them.
No, it's wasn't Santa's attempt to reduce global warming by eliminating coal in the stockings.
I finally found a source for locally-grown, sustainably raised, beans.

A visit in early November to the Seed Savers Exchange website set my heart a-thumping and my stomach growling for their unusual heirloom varieties of beans.
It took some doing, DH has a hard time paying much for beans when a can of them can be purchased for 99 cents at the grocery store, but I finally convinced him to buy me the beans for Christmas.
And he took me literally.
All I got for Christmas was a whole bunch of beans!
So far, I've used the green flageolets and love them.
I can't wait to try the canellini beans next.
It will be hard to make myself use my smaller amounts of more unusual beans, especially the Hidatsa Reds, originally grown by Native Americans of the Dakotas and the Lina Cisco's Bird Egg beans,brought to Missouri by covered wagon in the 1880s.

4 comments:

Stephanie said...

It made me laugh that you said he bought you beans, and beans only.
They're beautiful. :)

Anonymous said...

Can I come visit? Can I? Can I? You see, then they would be "local where bought" and I could enjoy those tasty goodies... LOL! They so precious, and hooray for supporting local growers, even more so when they are such a part of the heirloom tradition. Lucky you for Christmas!

Claire MW said...

I love Seed Savers Exchange and look forward to their catalogue every year. I've never been up to the farm (it's a 4 hour drive from here) but I'd love to go one of these days. The beans look marvelous. I think I'll order some too!

Anonymous said...

Hi, I was sent your way by Chris (zamozo).

I bought the bean sampler from SSE a couple months ago and we LOVED the Christmas Limas -- I'll be buying more of those, for sure. I'm not a big fan of the various Jacob's Cattle beans -- we tend to prefer beans that cook down a bit more, and those don't too much. We still have a couple other types from the sampler to try out.

I love that picture of all those beans!!!