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~ FRENCH BEAN Seed ~ We eat a lot of french beans, so this section is one we work hard on. We've managed to add several new beans to the Collection recently, and we had fun trying to find a whole range of different colours. Incidentally, we found that these make a great decorative feature if grown all together, and its a fun project for younger members of the family. As always, here are the most productive & tastiest beans we have been able to find. We hope you will enjoy them too! When to sow beans? For the earliest production, sow bush varieties. Climbing beans take a little longer to start producing, but will then carry on over a much longer season, giving a higher yield overall. So we always sow a row of bush beans to start us off, then a big bed of climbers to last us right through the summer. If you prefer to only grow bush beans, then we would recommend making two or three sowings at three week intervals. You can sow your beans direct in the ground, but we find that we get a better result if we start them off in trays or pots, which lets us keep them away from mice, and also means that we can give them a bit of heat. ~ CLIMBING or POLE BEANS ~ 'Cherokee Trail of Tears' Pole Bean Simply the best bean there is. This bean was originally from the native North American Cherokee people. In 1838 they were driven out of their homelands in the state of Georgia by the US government to make room for more European settlers , a forced march known as the 'Trail of Tears'. This bean is one of their heirlooms they managed to keep with them and has been passed on from generation to generation ever since. We can see why the Cherokees valued it so much! It is incredibly prolific, cropping over a long season. We plant lots each year for our own use & feedback from all of you is always positive. Precariously, there is very little seed in existence (about 10 barrels of seed on the whole planet). We have for the past few years been working closely with the Seed Savers Exchange, who are bringing this valuable bean back into circulation, and we are now very proud to be able to offer the resulting crop of reselected seed, grown in northern Europe. Early Pole Snap/Dry. Tall, purple flowers, rounded green/ red pods. Black seed. Order BnCT - 70 seeds £1.95 [CO1] Feedback: "I have just started to harvest these, grown for the first time this season. I have been allotmenting for twenty-five years and have never been so delighted with a variety new to me. They are delicious and tender at any size from 2 inches to 7.(Sorry, I can't do metric automatically.)Some of them do need stringing, not predictably always the largest, but since you can tell as soon as you top & tail them, where's the problem? I've been handing them out to eat raw like sweets to my neighbours, all of whom have expressed interest in growing them next year. Thank you for introducing me to them. Please carry on the good work." Morene Griggs 'Cosse Violette' Purple Pole Bean An excellent vigorous early bean with purple flowers and stems, and nice stringless purple pods for fresh use, on quick growing plants. Lots of people have written in to say how much they like it. It is also particularly tasty, and nice to eat raw even when large. Other than that it is very early and productive, being completely covered with long crunchy purple pods! We love to grow purple and green varieties all mixed together, beautiful on the plants and in salads. (Note: the purple colour turns to green on cooking.) Purple pods. Early Pole Snap. Tall, purple flowers, rounded purple pods. Order BnVI - 80 Seeds £1.75 ~ BUSH BEAN Seed~ Ideal for an early crop, and also the best for those on more exposed sites or those who don't want to be bothered with making supports for climbing varieties. 'Minidor' Yellow Bush Bean This is a really nice bush bean with bright golden yellow pods.  Pretty and tasty, this one always produces well for us. The pods have a smooth buttery taste when cooked. They do keep their lovely yellow colour after cooking and look really pretty on the plate or in a salad Bush Snap with straight round yellow pods. (i.e. a wax-podded type) Order BnMI - 180 to 200 seeds £1.70 'Aquilon' Green Bush Bean This is a really good 'standard' green bush bean from France chosen for earliness and productivity. Aquilon is a modern variety with very long round green pods - up to 20 cm long - produced in large numbers, stringless, and held high up, so easy to find when picking. We like it a lot. Long green pods. Early Bush Order BnAQ - 150 seeds £1.72 'Cupidon' Filet Bush Bean This was one of our best discoveries a while back. It's a wonderful bush bean that produces a huge number of tender dark green pods all summer, starting early, and continuing cropping well after the others have finished. It has a particularly good flavour used raw in salads. This is actually a dual-purpose bean -the pods are a filet type so if you like it can be picked very small and eaten that way. (Filet beans are the ones with long straight slender pods that are very pointy at the end, traditionally a gourmet dish: picked young, lightly steamed and served with butter.) But the beans also stay completely stringless as it gets to full size and it makes a fantastic normal French bean. This one's flavour is particularly good! Green pods. Early/Maincrop Bush , long cropping. Order BnCU - 150 seeds £1.88   ~ Saving your own Bean Seed ~ The physical seed-saving is easy, but the need for isolation (to keep the seed true to type) depends on the species: French Beans (this page) don't usually cross with each other, so you can save seed from several varieties without worry. Runner Beans DO cross very easily, so only grow one variety if you want to keep the seed. Broad Beans also cross A LOT and are harder to keep for seed as you need to isolate them from others with 1/2 a mile or so. Also, be sure that you don't plant types with similar-coloured seeds next to each other, otherwise you'll not be sure which plant they come from if they all grow tangled together. More detailed seed-saving instructions are included with your seeds, so you can do all this yourself at home.