Bean fever!

Okay, officially I am on a bean sowing spree now. I had earlier mentioned how easy it is to grow french bush beans(dwarf variety) at home and that currently there is a container full of bean plants growing in the garden.This set of plants are nearing the flowering stage with tiny white(ish) buds appearing here and there.

But having seen how easy the task is, I did not want to stop with just one container. So with my niece's help I prepared another container and sowed another set of seven seeds.

Of course, that is not going to satisfy my eagerness. So I sowed a third set of bean seeds in the backyard,marking our first try to grow them in the soil directly. Here the seedlings growing in a straight line(around eight of them)are of the double beans variety. The ones growing in a semi-circle kind-of shape(in total nine plants)are the french bush beans.

Each of the sets have an interval of two weeks between them,so that the harvests extend over a set of months at least. In total we now have around 7+7+9 = 23 french bean plants and around 15 broad bean plants growing in the garden.

I could have ended the post with just the above,had I not discovered a fact about the state of the seeds that are currently available in the market. See, I had one packet of french bean seeds that lasted only for the first two sets of sowing.The seeds from this packet were of light brown color.The refill seeds that I bought recently from the Sunday market had a mix of pink and light brown color seeds with pink being the majority. I was joyed to see this, as I had heard that the pink seeds give good healthy plants and they tend to be more bushier. But my mom had a doubt whether the pink ones are actually kidney beans(what we call as Soya/Rajma in the local language) since the pink shade was more pronounced and almost close to being called red. We were in a dilemma but still went ahead and sowed the pink ones. Later when I wanted to sow the fourth set (yes, I sowed another set :), I called on my mom again to ask what to do if they turn out to be Rajma. We do not eat that bean variety that much and they sometimes taste bland in our opinion. Somewhere during the conversation, we decided to soak the seeds and check out the color, and lo behold, once I put them in the water,it turned out that the pink ones are not actually pink.



They are indeed the same light brown colored bean seeds but just had a coat of pink painting on them. I was shocked to see this and could not opine anything on this cheap trick that the seller had resorted to in order to sell them. Or..are they really cheap tricks or is any kind of adulteration being done even in the seed market.?

Anyway they all went into the ground as my fourth set of sowing.We will keep an eye on this batch to determine the actual difference in harvests between the normal and the 'colored' ones.