Growing Borlotti Beans

[pelmetman]

I need help with drying and storing Borlotti Beans please. They seem really easy to grow and I get loads of beans on the plants but when it comes to drying them they go all soft and mouldy.
Do you dry them in the pods? And where would be the best place to dry them? Any help would be most grateful.

[indy]

If you have a rayburn I dried mine on a tray on the plate rack alternatively the warming oven of an aga

[Odsox]

I dry mine in a dehydrator ... just another reason for owning one.
Plus as it's so humid here I use it to dry saved pea seed and other beans too, otherwise they just germinate in the pods.
One of the more useful gadgets I've ever bought.

[Keaniebean]

I managed to dry some on the vine last year, but this was totally unintentional, so it is possible. I seem to remember I got them in really early and we had a hot dry summer here in London anyway. That has probably got something to do with it.

An alternative to a dehydrator would be to put your oven on the lowest possible temperature and leave them in there with the door ajar. You need to turn the oven off when it gets too hot and on again when it gets too cold, so it's really fiddly and probably not worth the effort, unless you have a shed load in there.

[grahamhobbs]

Drying them shouldn't really be a problem, allow them to at least partially dry on the plant and pick them when the weather is dry, then spread out indoors on newspaper and allow the pods to dry out so that the beans can be easily removed. Put the beans in the freezer for at least 48 hours (alternatively they can be heated in the oven for 1/2hr at 130degC - but then can't be saved for resowing next year) This is to kill any bean weavils.
If put in the freezer the beans will need to be dried off, again spread on some newspaper, before putting in sealed containers.

[Millymollymandy]

I left mine to mature/dry out on the plant then left the podded beans in a bowl on my kitchen table for a couple of weeks, then straight into an airtight storage container.

Might be an idea to spread straw under the plants and they tend to dangle all over it (if you have the dwarf ones) and even with my dry soil some of them rotted earlier on.

[pelmetman]

Thanks for all the tips. I'll give them one more try this year and see what happens.

[Jandra]

I've had borlotti beans for several years now and they've always done well for me. I leave them to dry in the pods on the vines for quite a long time. Then a couple of weeks spread out on a newspaper in the attic.
Next I take them out of the pods and put them in the freezer for 48 hours to kill any eggs of the bean beetle. Then I dry them some more on trays, so that they are back at room temp and really dry. Then they go into bean beetle proof containers.

I lost my first havest to the larvae of the beetle, so that's a mistake I'll never make again.

Jandra