I grew 4 kinds of beans this year: Edamame soybeans (variety Moon Cake), Romano pole beans, Hutterite (dry) beans, and a sort of cranberry bean (also for drying).

One wierd thing: I got inoculant powder with bacteria that help the beans make their own nitrogen fertilizer from the air. The bacteria form small bumps on the bean roots; I've seen them before. But when I pulled some of the bean vines up after all the beans were picked, there weren't too many nodules.

I started a thread about Edamame some time ago here:

http://www.veggieboards.com/boards/showthread.php?t=35666

They turned out well. I learned when to pick them; at first I picked some of them when they were too small. I even tried a few edamame uncooked, and they almost melted in my mouth- vary nice taste.

The Hutterite and cranberry beans did well too, only I thought they were a bush type that didn't need anything to climb on... I found I was mis-informed about that. (That's one nice thing about edamame soy beans- they stand up by themselves.) I guess I dropped a few Hutterite beans when I was harvesting them- there are a few small bean plants sprouting in that area. I wonder if I should dig them up and try to grow them inside?...

I'm going to try the Romano beans as a dry white bean; normally they're eaten as a green bean.

Hooray for beans! I got a pretty good crop of dry black-eyed peas (actually a kind of bean), and a fair crop from a small patch of moth beans (a kind of Indian bean), but my regular beans all got eaten by bugs.

I wouldn't try growing beans inside, there just isn't enough light for them.

Tom, if I had the space and patience, I'd grow my own food too. Are beans hard to grow?

Catgirl: In my experience, they're among the easiest vegetables to grow. As I see it, the only trick with growing beans that you're going to dry and shell (like kidney, red, navy, or pinto beans, as opposed to green beans) is you don't want them to stay wet and maybe get moldy.

I still can't figure out why the bacterial nitrogen-fixing inoculant didn't take well, though- there were at most only a very few nodules on the roots I saw.

Ludi: I don't think beans would do well indoors either, even though I had a large window put in the south wall of my house for solar heating during winter. I'm tempted to rescue those plants that started from the few beans I must have dropped, though. I guess beans don't need a dormant period before they germinate. Maybe my cat and rabbits would enjoy them even if the beans didn't get that big.... I'll check first, but I think the leaves of garden beans are edible.