Heirloom Beans -Finished!
Gotcha! Can you find the real beans?!! I just had to take a photo of the art with some real beans on it! As I was designing the remaining groups to paint, I kept surprising myself with how the real beans seemed to look like the painted beans. Without further ado, here is the finished piece (Maybe, I still have a few days before it absolutely has to be done, I will probably tweak it just a bit…)
Heirloom Shell Beans from Purity Farms
All the beans are from Purity Farms in Moosup, CT. They are a regular vendor at the Coventry Farmers Market. The last day of the Winterfresh market is this coming Sunday, and I know for a fact that Fabyan Sugar Shack has this years maple syrup already!
The varieties are as follows; you can find many of them at the Vermont Bean Seed Company. I am thinking that I will try some this coming growing season. It’s a good fit with my gardening style; I tend to forget to harvest my green beans until they are way too old to eat, shell beans are perfect because they need to get old and tough!
Red and white spotted – Jacobs Cattle Dry Bean, also known as ‘Anasazi Bean’. Old but origin unknown.
Caramel/Yellow – Brown Dutch Dry Bean. Old Pennsylvania Dutch heirloom
Dark Red/Maroon – Low’s Champion Bean. Heirloom bean know for its sweet flavor.
Black – Midnight Black Turtle Bean. Heirloom black turtle bean. Traditional favorite in American Southwest.
Mocha/Cream swirled – Peregion Dry Bean. Oregon heirloom with unsurpassed eating quality.
Cream/White – Cannellini Dry Bean. Also known as ‘White Kidney Bean’. Classic Italian white shelling bean.
Pale Yellow – Hutterite Soup Bean. The Hutterite Soup Bean is named for the Hutterites, a religious community that immigrated to the high mountain region of Taos, New Mexico from Austria in the 1760’s.
Another source of Heirloom Dry Shell beans is Seed Savers Exchange. I hope they get the Hutterite Soup Beans in time for spring planting!
Onward to finish my olive branch painting this week and to also work on my next egg tempera panel I started one nice warm September afternoon ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ (Notice my theme yet?!)
Soaking up the sun at a Villa just up the road from Palmerino