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Indian Bean LabLab Purpureus Seeds
Packet of 10+ freshly harvested seeds!
It is generally pretty hard to find organically grown seed from this fella, and here is plenty to get you started! Huge cropping awesome flowers, tastes great and grows like a weed! Now that’s my sort of plant!
This is the softer shelled “Alba” variety that is more suited for eating than the other more ornamental flowered varieties on the market.
Its also known by a multitude of names such as Old man beans, Poor mans beans, Hyacinth beans, Dolichos, Lablab beans, Rongai bean, Fuji mame, Butter Beans or even Bouanavista pea.
It has a huge nutritional component with about 30% Protein and high levels of Vitamins A, B, C, Potassium, Phosphorus, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium along with a heap of trace elements.
The plants themselves have been cultivated for thousands of years and are quite delicious when harvested young, and as they are constantly producing new flowers and tender beans its super easy to just wander down and pick a half a bucket or so. They can be stirfried, steamed, boiled and the mature dried beans have been dried and pounded into cake/breads and baked by many Africa tribes for millennium.
They are a very nutritious staple in many regions of the world even today. Especially popular in Japan, India, Thailand and of course Africa. But even gaining popularity in the USA these days due to its hardiness and versatility.
They can be grown up a fence or trellis with great effect. Can even be grown it a small pot on an apartment balcony, just letting them spread out on the handrail.
Unlike other beans that die out each year this one just keeps on producing, if it gets too big, just hack a bit off it. Its pretty hard to kill them, even if you really neglect them.
I chopped out a heap of Lantana on the property and planted a couple of these where the lantana was. As you can’t really kill the Lantana (without poison) we just let these beans shade the stumps out.
We get lots of free beans and the Lantana take 3x as long to grow without the sunlight. The trash from the chopped up Lantana make a great mulch/trellis for the beans. Saw it done years ago with Blackberry back down south. Great idea and turns a useless patch of land into a delicious and money saving crop.
It can be really heavily cut back and used as mulch for nitrogen craving plants and it just seems to come back with a whole heap more new shoots and flowers/beans.
On a dead Lantana trellis it can grow a couple metres wide and high, covering the whole bush in one season and producing buckets of beans. The whole lot can be cut back to just 20cm of stem and next year it will look just a good as it did before.
But don’t worry about it becoming a pest, as if you want to kill it, just cut it off 3cm below the ground with a shovel. One good chop and its gone for good (worked that one out by accident!).
And unlike the Lantana the leaf and stem is edible to Kangaroos, Cattle, Horses and other stock, although it doesn’t taste that flash in my opinion.
Grown by us organically, no nasties, no chems, no problems!!!
