Today's Q&A episode comes from Cindy, and it's a question that I asked myself and had a hard time finding the answer to.

She asked, I'm confused on harvesting beans.

Like when do you harvest if you want pinto beans as dry beans or for canning them as in ranch style beans?

So most of us think about growing green beans for the actual pod

that we snap and then we freeze or we can or we eat fresh. But a lot of us, including myself,

are trying to grow beans for the actual bean. Last year I grew black beans and was able to

can enough black beans to last us all year. And I've also grown pinto beans and canned them as well.

And it's so nice not to have to buy canned beans at the grocery store to be able to produce that

myself.

So that's really my goal to do more and more of that each year.

So if you have already planted beans that you would intend to harvest as the bean, not as the pod,

then that is a great question.

Now, a lot of people will just wait until the pod dries out and then they will harvest the dry bean.

And that would make it very shelf stable, obviously, the most shelf stable, because then you would just have the dry bean,

and then when you get ready to cook it, you would soak it and do whatever you would want to do

with that, like you would any kind of dry bean that you would buy. And so if you do that,

you will be waiting for a long time to harvest that because you have to wait for those pods to develop and then

you have to wait for the beans to develop and then you have to wait for the pods to dry out

and then the beans to dry out and that can add a considerable amount of time to your season and

to how long those beans will be in the garden. And you can do that. And most of us

actually do if we're saving seeds for the next season because it's the same process of saving

bean seeds for the next season, letting that pod dry out. But maybe you don't really care to have

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