Hello, Friend!
Our dragon tongue beans are coming in like gangbusters, and they are, indeed, very cool.
A quick detour -- where the heck did the phrase "cool beans" come from, anyway?
Though a few sources suggest it's associated with drug culture of the 1960's (some drugs resembling jellybeans), it seems more likely that it goes back much farther. The phrase "some beans" was used in the 19th century as slang for something impressive. And that phrase might have been derived from "full of beans", which, according to one source, originated in the horse-racing world from the fact that horses were fed beans to make them run faster.
Fast-forward to the early '90's, and we'd gotten to "cool beans", which really came into its own via repeated use by DJ Tanner in Full House. (A show that is hard to remember being cool beans itself, but appealed to those of us who were preteens at the time -- right? Anyone else?)
Anyway -- back to our own cool beans.
Dragon tongue beans are a hearty, beautiful heirloom wax bean that can be eaten fresh or cooked, or you can grow them to full maturity for dry beans. They're stringless and have a nutty, sort of sweet flavor. We love them raw with hummus, or cooked up in a stir fry.
Unfortunately, we're not the only ones who love these beans -- the Mexican bean beetles have definitely descended upon our plants. We squish hundreds of them while harvesting, despite our best efforts to keep Surround WP on the plants. Neem oil may be our next step against these guys, especially as most of what we see are larvae right now, though it's quite a daunting task to try to apply that well on the undersides of the leaves of three full rows of very bushy plants. Next year, perhaps we'll try row cover and/or some predatory wasps.
For now, even with pests, these plants are producing a ton and hopefully will continue to do so for a bit. Dragon tongue beans are one of our favorites!
