Tarbais Beans, Borlotti Beans and Bean Beetles

Living frugally means growing things to eat later in the year as well as to eat right now.  Obviously.  While nothing beats a tiny, fresh Cose Violetta bean plucked straight from the plant, deep purple on the outside and crispy green and juicy inside, this year's dried Borlotti beans have come a pretty close second.  We had the first tasting last night, boiled then fried and crushed a bit with onion, garlic, ground cumin, salt and pepper, and probably too much olive oil.  But to be honest, the flavour of the just boiled bean was pretty fine unadorned: earthy, nutty and dense.  Perfect autumnal food; so it's a pity that the temperatures are still up in the mid twenties and there is not even a sprinkle of snow to be seen.  All change on Tuesday, when we should wake up to a more wintry scene!

2013 Borlotti Beans

So why are we we eating our stash of dried winter vegetables when the garden is still chucking out courgettes, peppers and summer squashes?  The answer is down to a pesky little beast called the bean seed beetle, or sometimes the bean weevil, Acanthoscelides obtectus.  There is nothing more frustrating than unscrewing a a jar of carefully sown, grown, harvested, dried, podded and stored beans to find that half of them have adult beetles emerging from them.  And the other half may harbour beetles yet to appear.

Last year it was the local tarbais white beans which were the worst effected.  I had done a little experiment in the bean patch and rather than growing all the rows of flageolet, then all the rows of red kidney, then all the rows of cannellini (you get the idea) plus all the climbing borlotti and tarbais together, I mixed them all up.

Beans growing in amongst tagetes, sunflowers and cucumbers in 2013 in the hope of hiding the beans from the beetles!

And yet it was still the same bean type that were attacked - the Canadian Wonder red kidney suffered the least damage despite having rows of cannellini either side which were jars full of little dead bodies by the late spring!  The tarbais were so bad by the time we came round to eat them, that the lot were thrown out.  What a waste.

2012 rarbaise beans showing the damage as the adult beetles emerge and dead adults at the front

The plan for this year is that we are going to eat the beans early on in the autumn and winter, even if it means buying some in by the spring.  Plus eating them in the order of most damage last year.  So no red kidney beans and therefore chili until early next year.  The obvious flip side to this approach, is that there will probably still be bean beetle larvae in them, but they should be too small to notice!  And anything has to be better than watching adult beetles float to the surface of the bowl of water the beans are having their overnight soak in.  Ok, probably the unexpected crunch of an adult between your teeth is worse ...

Just harvested 2013 tarbais beans - no sign of beetles yet!

The last beans waiting to be podded.

I do hope my other half doesn't read this, as he is not (yet) aware of the eat-early-eat-young strategy for dealing with Acanthoscelides obtectus this winter.