Starting about eight years ago we began growing several varieties of dried beans. Each year has been full of lessons from the best way to prep the land, how often to cultivate, the best way to harvest, the best moisture level for beans for longer storage potential, and even the best bags for sale. We are proud of how much we have learned and how much we continue to improve on this crop.

Starting mid-November we have our dried beans available for purchase through the Dane County Farmer’s Market.

We currently have around fifteen different varieties of dried beans for sale and you can find us at the DCFM’s Late Winter Market at Garver Feed Mill on Saturdays starting in January of 2025.

Here are some helpful hints to get the most out of your beans:

1. Store them in a cool, dry, and dark location.
2. Soak your beans before cooking! (Check out two different methods below.)
3. You can cook a cup or two of beans at one time, but I find it is easier to cook the whole one pound package at once and then freeze what I don’t need right away. Then when I need beans I can just pop them out of the freezer and run them under some warm water and I am ready to go.
4. Each one pound package makes between 3-4 pint sized mason jars of beans. If you freeze your left over beans, ladle the beans into the jar and include some of the cooking liquid. Leave 1/2″ of head space in the jar so that when the liquid freezes it doesn’t crack the jar when it expands.

Soaking your beans

When I started cooking beans I used the invaluable cookbook How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman. He had two different methods that he uses, the best being the long soak method. You can also cook our dried beans with good success using an insta-pot, but I do not have experience using one, so I would follow their directions.

Here is a link to Mark Bittman’s website where he tells you how to do it.

Ideas for eating

We eat a fair amount of beans at our house, especially when my father-in-law is around. We eat them in soups, chili, baked beans, cowboy beans, bean burgers, refried, or in tacos, three bean salad, stuffed peppers, vegetarian bakes, with quinoa/stewed tomatoes/and sweet corn, we have even had them in chocolate cake, the list goes on and on!