Day Neutral Winged Bean

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We are excited to offer winged bean as an option for Florida summer vegetable gardening.  This tropical bean originates from tropical Asia and can be grown during hot, humid periods when many annual vegetables cannot survive.  We planted our seed crop in June to test the performance under summer conditions and were very impressed with their growth and production.  Our vines even survived hurricane Ian and continued to produce.  Winged bean is a vigorous vine that swallows a trellis and produces many pods which are cooked as a vegetable.  The name comes from the unique alien shape of the bean pods.  Virtually the entire plant is edible including the pods, dried beans, greens and even tubers in some varieties.

It has been years since we’ve grown and eaten winged bean.  This year we meant to cook some of our crop to take notes and unfortunately by the time we got around to wanting to try this all of the pods were too advanced.  Because of this we will refrain from commentating on the culinary qualities and allow customers to look this up elsewhere.

This variety is unique in that it readily flowers and produces when days are long, aka summer.  Most yard long beans are day sensitive, meaning that they will readily grow through the summer in Florida but will not produce until the Fall when days become short.  This unique trait allowed our friends to successfully cultivate this form all the way in Indiana where summer days are 16 hours.  This variety originated with ECHO and our friend who worked there told us a great story about the survival of this variety.  In some mishap, this rare variety was lost with no backup.  One person noticed a winged bean volunteer pop up near where many varieties had been grown the previous year.  They protected the little volunteer and lo and behold, it bloomed in the summer which confirmed it was the day-neutral variety.  This one volunteer seedling was the foundation for the whole population they have been growing and offering for years.

We originally acquired this variety through our friends at ECHO. We encourage all customers to take a tour of ECHO and financially support their critical work in global hunger relief. If we are momentarily sold out of this variety, it is probably best not to bother ECHO for seed as the majority of their seed production is for international development workers and their quantities can be very limited.

~20 seeds. Psophocarpus tetragonolobus