(More than) One Bean

This is what my windowsill has looked like for the last few weeks, as the last of our summer veggies ripened.

Just before Halloween, I made the call that everything that was going to make it had. We picked the last few things, and I tilled the ground ready for winter.

Remember this post about our beans?
Well, the experiment went pretty well. Even on our massive trip this summer they fared very well by themselves, and even dropped pods on the ground, which then sprouted and grew more!

The kids loved picking them and ate most of them raw. It took a few times picking them too soon for us to realize that even when the pods are plump, they're not ready. We learned to wait until they were brownish & starting to shrivel - then the beans were perfect.

We got black beans.

And pinto and kidney (these kidney's were still a little too soon.)

I left several of the black beans out on a plate to air dry.
I was surprised by how much they shrink as they dry.

I put them in a small zip-lock bag & sucked out the air. I'm going to save them until next spring and plant a whole new garden of beans. We really like black beans and eat them a lot, so I'll probably mostly grow the black beans.
So really, they will all have come from one bean - I love it!