Sidelight - Gardening in Pueblo, CO - Yard Long Beans

Everything grows better in Pueblo.  OK, not everything, but what does well here does very well.  The Wet Mountains were the first part of the North American continent to emerge from the ocean.  The Arkansas River is an ancient, ancient river, and it has run at sizes incomparable to what we now call a river.  Its course has changed through countless channels in this area, and it has flooded the entire basin countless times over millions of years.

What the hell does this have to do with gardening?  In certain parts of town, Pueblo, Colorado is a plant's version of a super tasty layer cake, with the difference being that the plant can live off of it.  Ultra fine organic matter permeates the soil at depths of over 9 feet in some areas, layered with fine sand. Beans, chiles and corn, as well as squashes, pumpkins, tomatoes, melons, and even grapes are extraordinarily happy here.

As you walk around Pueblo, CO, you'll notice that about 1 out of every 100 houses has a vegetable garden somewhere in plain sight.  You can see the dramatic battles that people play out year after year against the heat, the dry air, the weeds, the birds and the bugs.  Some people are winning, and some people are losing, but certain plants just don't seem to fail no matter how well kept the garden is.

The Yard Long Bean is one such plant.  It is a resilient, heat-loving bastard of a vine that will stand up to a certain degree of neglect and thrive even in soil temperatures of over 150 degrees.  The leathery, dark leaves make no pretense of shading either the crown of the plant or the poles that it climbs.  They serve only to gather energy for producing the ridiculously long bean pods that are the plant's namesake.

The blossoms are quite large for bean flowers, and they are a lovely gradient from lavender purple to almost absolute white.  The bean pods are wonderful as green beans, with a flavor more reminiscent of bean than green.  Harvesting waves of flowers will produce subsequent waves of greater volume.  The ripe beans are black beans, suitable for all of the uses of a dried bean.

Keep your eyes open as you walk around Pueblo, Colorado, and you are sure to spot some.