I've been learning about plants, as I wish to draw them from life. Until this very week I didn't even know that haricots (which I did understand to be the French name for beans), a variety of string bean we also know as French Beans were actually just the young pods of the kidney bean.
I found out this way. We decided to make a big pot of kidney bean soup (artists have to eat!) and I decided to take out a handful of the beans and sprout them just to see what they would look like. Now I cannot kill anything that I start as long as it is healthy and wants to live, so after they sprouted I put them in a container of grow rocks and poured water over them with a small amount of liquid nutrients and a month later there were buds all over the little puppies. Then this:

A work of art if I ever saw one!
Moreover, just two days later there was an inch long bean where this flower had been. Soon there will be hundreds of them, I hope. All from a handful of dried beans from the supermarket, stolen from the soup pot. Life is good.
More on my beans is HERE.
The same week we got the first flowers on our anasazi beans.
Those are the purple and white ones that look as though paint had been spilled over them. They taste very much like pinto beans, but cook up faster and softer and they have a slightly sweeter, slightly less nutty flavor. They are good! Presumably, the snap beans are good to eat fresh as well, but we'll have to wait a few more weeks to know for sure.





