French haricots verts are slenderer and more tender than your average American green beans. Shutterstock/ViktoriaIvanets
Bean season is near, and for the first time in my column-writing life I am looking forward to it. You can blame – or credit – a 28-day cruise my wife Nancy and I took last January.
Holland America served green beans with dinner. Nancy and her family were never green bean fans and my mother, always trying to stretch a dollar, served many meals of canned green beans during my childhood, which I never liked. Then, as a pre-teen I got a job one summer picking beans. We got 25 cents for each 5-gallon pail, and day after day, I picked fewer pails than anyone else.
So beans and I, especially green string beans, have had a strained relationship.
The cruise line, though, served haricots verts — skinny, crisp, flavorful French beans that, if you ask me, bear little resemblance to canned string beans or the kind I picked as a boy. Even Nancy’s late mother, who once told me she spent a summer eating nothing but beans while working for the University of Massachusetts, might have enjoyed these.
After more than 28 days, you’d think I ‘d get sick of eating them at every meal, but I didn’t. A University of Vermont Extension article says that many cooks favor haricots verts over American string beans because they don’t have the strings, so are more tender. They’re also more flavorful.
This past Memorial Day weekend I planted Rolande bush French filet beans from Renee’s Garden Seeds, based in California, and Maxibel Haricot Vert from High Mowing Seeds, based in Vermont.
Why, you might wonder, did I, as a confirmed buy-local advocate, purchase seeds from away? I consider High Mowing, based in Vermont, practically local. Although Maine is the largest New England state, it is still small by national standards (random fact: some seven Maines would fit inside Texas), and I consider anything from New England, western New Brunswick and southeastern Quebec to be native to our region. Others may disagree, but I’m sticking with it.
Renee’s Garden Seeds somehow discovered I write a gardening column and offers me a few packets of free seeds each spring. Being a thrifty Mainer, I take them. This is one I took.
I don’t, as yet, have actual beans. We are still eating the first crop of shelling peas and have a second crop of late peas coming, but I have high hopes that the haricots verts will be a good summer vegetable. Both varieties are healthy and have blossoms, where I have seen bees busily spending time. My hopes are so high, in fact, I’m thinking that a second crop of haricots verts might be nice to eat in the fall. Once the early peas have gone by, I’ll do a second planting in the space where I pull up the pea vines.
The two varieties I am growing are bush beans, which will grow from 18 inches to 3 feet tall. Haricots verts also come in pole varieties, according to that same University of Vermont article. While pole beans produce more heavily, they have to be supported and are not advised for beginning gardeners. Be sure you like green beans before you invest in the poles for the beans to climb.
I have grown beans in past years. For about five years, I grew beans to use in black bean soup, but I gave that up because the small amount of beans we harvested wasn’t worth the work it took to grow and shell them.
Nancy’s grandmother was a fan of a bean called “Low’s Champion,” a flat bean that could be eaten early in the season as a snap green bean and, if left to mature, as a reddish shell bean or dried bean. The variety was introduced in 1884, but today only a few specialty catalog vintage seed companies offer it. Once Nancy’s grandmother died, we stopped growing them, though they were good growers and tasty. Annapolis Seeds, which sells them, says that it was an Abenaki variety. All that makes me want to give them another try next year.
Maybe, as I mature, my 60-year dislike of beans is ending.
Tom Atwell is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth. He can be contacted at: tomatwell@me.com
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