Shelling Last Seasons Beans

I’m not sure if this is the right way to dry out beans, but it works for us. We just leave our beans up on their trellis, or in this case a fence, over winter.

They looked dry enough so we grabbed us some beans.

And these aren’t just any beans. They are Red Runner Beans.

They have black and pink/purple beans inside and in spring they have red flowers all over them. They are beautiful inside and out. We collected them all and shoved them in our pockets.

Before we went in we inspected some tracks:

And checked out some poop.

Lou is fascinated by bunny poop. I guess it is kind of interesting.

Anyways, we went in, put our stash of beans on the table,

and went to work.

We then played with the beans in all sorts of manner. They have such a nice weight to them.

We are getting ready to buy our seeds for the spring. We use Johnny’s Seeds and Bountiful Gardens. Johnny’s has the runner beans.

I just heard on my Stuff You Should Know podcast that there’s a group called the Great Sunflower Project that sends you sunflower seeds and in return they ask you to monitor your bee activity. We’re going to participate in it this year. The honey bees really love those sunflowers. I hear they like mint too.

The Great Sunflower Project.