Growing Black Bean
Most of the older generations are very familiar with consuming long bean leaves as food. Black bean leaves actually taste very similar to long bean leaves.
We grew black bean some times back for the delicious nutritional black beans. Along the way, surprises keep popping up. Not only are the beans delicious, the leaves taste as good as the green bean leaves. Even the young pods/beans can be stir fry and eaten as a dish! In short, almost every parts of the plant can be eaten at different stages of growth. Best of all, they actually taste good.
The bean vines grow pretty fast. At day 4, the sprouts will be about 15cm tall already.
They should be about 1 foot tall by month one and will need some kind of support from then. The figure below shows 2 rows of 2 months old vines at about 1m height
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| Fig 2: 2 months old black bean Vine. |
The typical spacing needed per vine is 30x30cm, if you plant them in a planter bed. For best result, the depth of planter should be at least 30cm. If you plant them in a pot, use a 30cm diameter pot with height of at least 25cm, ideally 30 to 35cm.
They need full sun of at least 6 hrs to fruit well. Black bean belongs to the legumes family and can help to amend the soil. We used it as a rotating crop and plant on plots which needed some rest before next planting cycle.
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| Video 1: Month 3, lots of flowers and pods. Self pollinated. Fig 3: Below, closed up on the flowers 
You can harvest the pods at various stage of maturity depending on how you wish to cook them.
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| Fig 4, pods at different stage of maturity. L to R: very young, mid, old and ver old |
Harvest the very young pods when it is still very soft to touch. These can be stir fry with pork or chicken or prawns and eaten like french beans.
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| Fig 5: Very young beans/pods stir fry just with olive oil and garlic. Yummy! Once the beans matured, they stay green but turn hard, it is then best to leave them on the vines till they turn slightly brown. You can then harvest them to eat as beans. Time for black bean soup!
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You can harvest the young leaves and cook them in your favourite noodle soup just like green bean leaves.
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| Fig 8: the top 2 leaves with lighter shade of green are the best tasting young leaves. Fig 9: below, noodle soup with young leaves and Choy Sim |
DO NOT harvest all the leaves, the plant needs them to make food! We suggest interlace harvesting, cut alternate leaves.
We personally prefer to eat the leaves korean style, just like how we prepare pickled perilla leaves. Simple 5 ingredients is all you need.
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| Fig 10: Korean Style Pickled Perilla leaves |
We followed the recipe here:
The vines/plants are good for harvest up 9 months or a year or when pests get to them. Do check weekly for pests like aphids, white flies and get rid of them at first onset of pests attack.
We typically hard prune every 2 to 3 months after we have harvested most of the pods, by chopping off the top to keep them at the height of about 1m. New branches will form at nodes below the cut and they will start another cycle of flowering and fruiting.
Productivity will drop typically by month 8 or 9 and it is best to restart over again.
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