Growing Yardlong Beans: Easy Gardening Success

When it comes to beans, there are so many varieties it will make your head spin.

Bush, pole, spotted, striped, red, yellow, black, white, and variations in between. This year we tried a bean known as yardlong bean, Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis. It also goes by the name of longpodded-cowpea or asparagus, bodi, long or snake bean.

I found this bean actually looking for a gourd known as snake gourd. It’s an Indian species called chichinda. We are growing both this year and I’m very happy I came across the bean as well!

Inevitably each summer beans come on faster than we can harvest, eat and/or put them away.

Each season we end up eating some beans that are too mature – this means harder, larger beans in the middle with a tough shell. Not great no matter how you slice them!

As the yardlong beans come on this year, we are eating them in varying stages of maturity.

They were trellising on the burgundy okra before I realized they were even setting fruit so the first ones we tried were a bit mature. They were delicious! One thing I am really enjoying about these beans is being able to comfortably eat them at any stage of their growth.

Another thing I really like is that the beans are very easy to harvest.

Because they are so long, each bean you cut  (usually I cut two off of the plant at a time as two pods grow next to each other) equals at least 6 regular beans. It makes for a much faster harvest time.

When they get to the kitchen it’s faster processing as well.

I simply take all of the beans and put them together in a bundle, bend them in half, cut the bend and start chopping them up. The long bean easily stays in my hand as I chop. Instead of chopping a few regular beans at a time, I am able to chop up 8 yardlongs bent in half in as much time resulting in a meal’s worth of beans.

Things that I can harvest quickly and easily process in the kitchen are winners around here.

We prepare a lot of homegrown food – in fact most meals this time of year are directly from the garden (and freezer in the case of meats) so ease of prep is a desirable trait. Because each bean only has one attachment point to the main plant, there aren’t as many stems to remove either. It’s awesome!

I’m not sure why I hadn’t heard anyone sing the wonders of yardlong beans in the past, but I’m glad to be growing them now.

We have a purple variety and it retains its color when cooked making for beautifully colorful meals (along with the burgundy okra we are ingesting a lot of purple!). I find them delicious when they are young and thin as well as yummy when they get thicker and the beans mature. If the shells are too old, it is easy to slip the more mature beans into the pot. I think at this stage they resemble a northern white bean in texture, appearance and taste (cook time is fast and adds some nice protein).

This year in growing the yardlongs we are “staying on top of” our bean harvest, enjoying faster prep time in the kitchen and delicious homegrown meals. We will be saving these seeds and growing them again!