Bean Counter
I tell you, I’m a real sucker for those bold images of colorful harvest baskets abounding with an assortment of vegetables all carefully arranged to showcase their beauty. Even better if they are complete with a loving sprinkling of herbs and perhaps a well-placed cherry tomato and cucamelon or two. Like the artful work of a food photographer, it suggests a mouth-watering abundance that can rival a loaded pantry shelf or bushel baskets heaped and lining a root cellar wall to a gardener’s heart.
Just as much, I love seeing an assortment of dry beans (or seeds… Our local Amish seed store has a glass countertop and underneath is a shadowbox-esque showcase of seeds. It’s a beauty.) And every year, to humor my children and make gardening more exciting for them I tell myself, I’ll choose a fancy variety of dry beans to grow in a quarter of the beds I mark for beans.
I don’t know if it is the season winding down and my frantic, summer work-focused mind starts to clear, or it’s the tediousness of the labor of shelling beans, but they seem to give me something new to ponder every year. Last year, I couldn’t help but compare how measly the yield of 600 square feet of bean beds is, filling just a few bowls, and the work involved in shelling them while my family simultaneously butchered over 400 pounds of chickens. (The next, most natural thought, of course, is how absurdly ridiculous it is for the “experts” to insist the world transition to plant-based protein. Even if it were a complete protein, we’re all going to starve if they get their way.)
This year, Calypso beans, with each little bean I popped down into a bowl with a swipe of my thumb, looking like Heidi, our black and white speckled cow, has delighted my heart with their beauty while furrowing my brow with their yield for the cost.
The cottage economist in me bristled yet again by the rising price on the seed packet, dwindling seed quantity when that gardener’s present to ourselves is opened, and the disappointing yield after three months of work and striving for a bounty.
With some economic experts’ dire warnings of what we will face in the coming years (while others bury their heads in the sand), many are feeling a little more than a pinch in their pocketbooks and are turning to the home garden to try to offset the rising costs of food on the shelves and the uncertainty of the food supply in the future. As folks dive into the world of growing their own food, the lure of the colorful harvest basket is a Siren Song. The variety is appealing to the senses but simply isn’t going to fill the pantry shelves with a useful surplus come winter.
Of course, that may not be your objective. In which case, I’m not talking to you. Gardening can be a beautiful, soul-filling, grounding hobby. It is worthy of everyone’s pursuit in my opinion. I think everyone at least ought to dabble for the simple reason alone that they might set down the hoe with more respect for those who tirelessly grow their food. But it’s the newer gardener with a nervous worry swirling into a tightening knot in their gut over filling their family’s hungry bellies one day that I’ve in mind today.
If our main objective when dropping those seeds in the ground each spring is to maximize the highest yield for the lowest possible cost in the least amount of space, then when those beautiful images come flitting across our social media feeds and our eyes start spiraling like a hypnotized cartoon character in our entrancement over their beauty, we must shake our heads to clear our minds and remember to be sensible.
We must consider our family economy.
Calypso Beans: A Lesson in Cottage Economy
It was what we call the Heidi Beans that caught my attention flipping through the seed catalogs one frosty December day last winter. What a fun addition that would be in the garden this year! I winced at the cost of the packet, but all the prices are going up and I will save my own seed after harvest so it’s a one-time investment.
Or so I thought.
The packet was $3.25 for an ounce of beans, with each packet containing 75-200 seeds per ounce (what a range!), with an average of 145 seeds per packet. I weighed an ounce of my harvested seed today and came up with only 55 seeds, which means far fewer plants than expected, though the beans themselves are larger. We can hardly dare to assume a 100% germination rate and in the busy spring season, I wasn’t documenting what it actually was.
Over the past week, I have spent my days harvesting, shelling, and sorting beans. Then on to weeding, working the beds back into shape, and sowing them in a cover crop of oats to reduce winter erosion. It is a lot of work for a small yield compared to other crops but I realize this and am willing to sacrifice the space for taco night or winter soups & stews.
The final step after all of that is to weigh the harvest.
I try to keep fairly decent harvest records, as encouragement in seeing all that I’ve grown, a yardstick to measure against past yields, and a goalpost to grow more in the future.
My yield on Calypso Beans this year was just 8 ounces from a 1-ounce packet of seeds, a yield multiplier of 8 (relevant later), and about a half pint of beans. If I were to can these beans it would take about a quarter pint per canned pint for a total of two pints.
So for $3.25 plus $2.00 per jar, nearly 4 months of labor and rent in the garden, and the meat stock & energy used to can them, I yielded two meals worth of beans. (And of course, that’s not a full meal.)
With a can of organic beans being sold for $1.87 on Azure Standard, I have robbed myself. Cash alone, that’s over $5.25 I spent for $3.74 worth of food.
What if I was to use all of my yield for next year’s seed? Eight ounces of seed from the same company is $10.62. Better, but still hardly worth the effort.
I will console myself with the fact that since I’ll can my beans in meat stock instead of water they will be healthier and taste better. If I’m really pushing it, I’ll mutter some sweet words to myself about sustainability and self-sufficiency.
Now the kidney beans did fare slightly better, and black beans even more so, albiet both lack the excitement that makes you want to grab your camera and share them with the world.
The kidneys beans produced 6 ½ pounds of beans in one 50’ x 3’ bed (three rows of beans per bed). The black beans came in at 8 ½ pounds in the same amount of space.
While I didn’t weigh or count the seeds planted into the beds this spring, my best estimate is based on 50 dry bean seeds per ounce/800 per pound, spaced 3” in the row, 12” apart for 3 rows in a 3’ bed means I need 600 seeds, ¾ pound of bean seed. Both black beans & kidney beans I saved from the previous year’s seed so there was no cost there (a savings of $21.50.)
If you’ll recall, my yield multiplier on Calypso was 8.
.75lbs seed x 8 = 6 pounds yield, making kidney beans a slightly better investment than Calypso Beans for the dry bean garden rows.
And black beans even better, yielding 11 ½ times the number of beans (and that’s assuming they weighed the same as kidney bean seeds, which they don’t so technically, they went even farther. Keeping “fairly decent” records is all I claimed.)
But do you know how many potatoes I could grow in one of those rows? Over 75 pounds! (Of course, I’m not talking about fingerlings or blues or anything, but russet-sized tatties.) When you think of it in those terms, growing beans at all can be difficult to justify and seems a waste of perfectly good garden space.
But all of this rambling on about bean seeds and pounds and ounces and yields isn’t to discourage anyone from growing beans. Far from it! I’ll be here again next year sliding my thumb through pod after pod after pod to add some easy-to-grow crop and texture to our winter diet, though I’m considering reducing the space devoted to them in half and planting more potatoes or sweet potatoes instead.
Rather, I hope to encourage you to shift your mindset to carefully prioritize the space you give to certain staple crops and consider how you can make simple choices such as choosing more productive ones, selecting varieties that are less exotic or more geared to appeal to the market gardener (who grow for higher yield in less space), and to maximize the production for your family table and pantry shelves.
If your garden space is limited then there may be some crops that it would be more economical for you to continue to stock up and buy from the market, such as dry beans and pumpkins for example, while you devote your garden space to more reliably higher-yielding crops that give you more bang for your bed.
Thank you for breaking this down! I will use this info when planning my Spring garden 🙌🏼