Shelling beans

Shelling beans are the ones that are left on the plant to fully mature and the seeds picked to be used in the cooking either dry or green.Home grown shelling beans are very rare to come by here since most of us like to harvest the beans young and tender and prefer to eat beans with the pods.Although personally I like the shelling beans more,especially when they are green.This years' avarakai abundance has given us the luxury to leave some of the pods to harvest as shelling beans.For the past few weeks, we have been picking the shelling beans both green and dry and stored the dried beans and making varieties of delicious pulikulambu with the green ones.

So far we would have picked atleast 2 kilograms of shelling beans (weighed without the pods).One afternoon I was able to join my mom in the beans picking and shelling session and I truly had fun doing it. I was also able to photograph a lot.. as I was bowled over by the variety of color in the seeds although the pod color were the same.So obviously I had to record them in my camera and post it here for any reference.Here they are..

The variety of seeds from the same colored pods

Now the dried beans. They were completely dry on the plant before we picked and hence we did not have to dry them separately before shelling.

It seems like in our south Indian cuisine,tamarind and shelling beans are a good combination.Hence the dried beans are most probably reserved to be used in puliyodarai. I am very grateful that we have a good harvest when it comes to the avarakai creepers as they are already a year old now and still flowering to give us another round of harvest season.I am really grateful that we came across good seeds to start with last year as I now know the importance of good seed+good soil+good planning combination when it came to gardening. So of course,we are planning to select some of the best ones from the above lot to use for sowing in the Aadi month.