Dragon's Tongue Bean | Phaseolus vulgaris
White and purple speckled flat beans are a treat to look at and eat.
Although it sounds frightening, there is nothing scaly, ferocious, or fire-breathing about this bean. The dragon has been tamed. The purple-streaked pods are tender, buttery, and smooth, with a palate-friendly flavor. It just looks ferocious, with its mottled exterior and its intimidating abundance. But, like all sheepish dragons, this one just wants to be accepted and loved. That's not hard to do: the flavor and beauty of this variety are as easy to adore as a sloppy friendly dragon lick.
These bush habit plants produce stringless purple-striped wax beans that are delicious for fresh eating and make great dry beans for soup.
Bush habit. Direct sow bean seeds after frost. Succession sow every 3 weeks until 8-10 weeks before first fall frost in order to have fresh, high-quality beans all season. Dragon's Tongue Bean does not require exceptionally fertile soil; average garden soil will do. Harvest when pods are just starting to reveal the shape of the beans inside. Or, allow bean pods to ripen fully and harvest the dry beans for use in soups and stews.
Days to Germination 7
Days to Maturity 55
Planting Depth ¾-1"
Spacing in Row 4-6"
Spacing Between Rows 36"
Height at Maturity 12-18"
Width at Maturity 10"
Sun Preference Full Sun
Artwork by Arik Roper. Seeds are rock stars, too! After starting out creating album art for bands, Arik has gone on to build a universe of strange and familiar fantasy, horror, surreal, and psychedelic imagery featuring fantastical creatures from all realms.
About Hudson Valley Seed Company
They are a values-driven seed company that practices and celebrates responsible seed production and stewardship. Hudson Valley are best known for their beautiful artist-design seed packs (Art Packs) that appeal to gardeners, gift buyers, and lovers of art and nature.
These Art Packs, most fundamentally, tell stories. Hudson Valley challenges artists to convey in a manner that is fully their own, the history and meaning of the seed variety contained in each pack. These stories were once integral to traditional societies-stories of seeds were often origin stories for entire communities and peoples, and the lore and beliefs that accumulated around seed varieties reflected the nearly familial way in which gardeners and farmers regarded their crops. Our society is, by and large, no longer connected to plants this way. But we like to think these Art Packs help to stitch our fragmented world back together: useful seeds, evocative art, both equally valuable to our experience of being human.