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Growing protein

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Mr_Yan

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So early this season I asked the question can I realistically grow protein in my garden. At this point I wasn't wanting to spend much money on it and only wanted to grow things we would actually eat. So the logical thing to try were black beans.

About a week after I got my winter squash and pumpkins in the ground I took roughly a cup of black beans from a new bag bought at the grocery store ($1.19 a pound) and planted two 50 foot rows next to my squash area spaced 10 to 12 inches between the rows. I had a really high germination rate from the grocery store beans and they grew really well. That is they grew well until after the main flowering stage when the squash started to vine out like crazy and over ran the bean rows.

After the crazy jungle stage of the vines, bean hedge-row, and weeds that I couldn't get to started to die back I found that there was a seemingly large crop of dryish bean pods. I waited a few more weeks and in early September I started harvesting the beans.

Harvesting dry beans by hand in small batches is a little labor intensive. I grabbed the whole plant from the garden and took that inside to work with after dark. The dry pods were removed from the plants and placed in a bin. Then I took a few nights listening to podcasts to remove the beans from the pods. Not sure how wet the dry feeling beans still were we allowed them to sit in a shallow baking dish for a few more weeks before transfering to a 4 liter glass wine jug.



Two nights ago we used some of these to make black beans and rice for dinner.

All told I harvested over 3.75 kg of black beans for the investment of some time and about a cup of beans from the grocery store.

I also had some green beans go too far for green beans so I let them go and will harvest them as soup beans. These are still in the ground.

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Season to date I have harvested 455.95 pounds from my gardens and spent $296.50 to do that (remember I bought a fancy tool this year). This works out to $0.65 per pound of produce. This includes the beans. I do still have a lot of squash growing in the garden.
 
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