Growing Asparagus Beans On A Windowsill

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

A small vegetable garden of asparagus beans will decorate your home and yield delicious pods

Actually, I didn't intend to specially grow beans at home on the windowsill. The case helped. At the end of winter, in order to replenish the reserves of vitamins and trace elements in the body, I use sprouts of various seeds for food - these are wheat, sunflowers, beans and peas.

Last year there was a good harvest of Fatima Curly Asparagus Beans and I decided to sprout them. I used some of the sprouted beans for food, and planted the remaining few sprouts in a flower container. However, I want to say right away that the land in the container was not quite ordinary. In the fall, I decided to conduct an experiment with earthworms. In a flower container (16x30 cm) I poured two parts of the land from the garden and one part of half-rotted manure, dug up a dozen earthworms in the garden and put them in this container, which I then transferred to the apartment and watered them with water as needed. I was interested to know how earthworms will ennoble the earth. Three months later, I checked how my charges are doing: they have grown significantly and even managed to multiply. Here in this land at the end of December I planted bean sprouts.

Since I have only one window in my apartment facing the sunny side, and in February it will already be occupied by seedlings, I put the container with beans on the north window. In a couple of days the first shoots appeared from the ground. Beans grew surprisingly very quickly, much faster than in the vegetable garden. Within a month I had to pull on a string for support, along which the beans began to rise even more rapidly. The first flowers appeared in mid-February.

Since the bean is a self-pollinating plant, after a while pods appeared. At the same time, I counted about 30 pods of different sizes. The first harvest was taken on March 2 - 10 unripe shoulder blades, with a total weight of 100 grams.

The pods of this bean variety are very tender, without a coarse parchment layer and without fibers. They can be used to prepare both first courses, adding to soups and borscht, and second courses, adding them to an omelet or side dish. I immediately pampered my loved ones with an omelet with green asparagus beans. Now I harvest about the same harvest once a week. I remove the pods when they are still green and the grains have not yet formed. For all the time, I fed the beans with manure twice, one glass each. In the ground, in the garden, the Fatima variety of climbing beans reaches a height of three meters, and the yield per square meter is about 3 kg. On the windowsill, the beans grew a little more than a meter, but the yield per 1 square meter of area was much higher. I think that my wards - earthworms - are “to blame” for this success. They tried so hard.

Beans are a short day plant, so they do not need additional lighting, and I also noticed that climbing beans are less demanding on lighting than bush varieties. Curly beans can be planted on a balcony or loggia in summer, even on the north side. Now the market offers many climbing bean varieties with white, red, purple flowers and very decorative pods of different colors. For example, Gerda beans usually have yellow pods, Matilda beans have purple pods, Turchanka beans have light green pods with a slight red streak; red beans (Turkish beans) of the Duchess variety bloom with bright red flowers, and the Blue Hilda asparagus beans have blue-purple pods.

I recommend to all townspeople who do not have garden and summer cottages, but have a love for green plants in their souls, to try to create the same mini-garden on the windowsill or on the loggia. Rejoice in the bloom of beautiful curly asparagus beans, and then indulge yourself with dishes from its delicious pods.