My friend Caroline was finally planting her Romano beans, now that the soil was good and warm.
She downplayed the event. “They’re like any Romano bean you can get from the seed catalogs,” she said.
Except that Caroline’s seeds descended from ones her neighbor Wally gave her before he died a few years back, at age eighty-nine. He grew the beans for decades, having obtained his stock from childhood pals born and raised in Garlic Gulch, the old Italian settlement in the Rainier Valley, where immigrants once maintained small farmsteads. Caroline thinks the strain is hundreds of years old. She’s pretty sure they’ve always been grown organically.
“Wally was kind of a health nut,” she said. He ate a cup of quinoa and a banana for breakfast. The beans he dried, stored in big pantry jars, and ate year round. He stood about 5 foot 2, Caroline said, and couldn’t have weighed more than 85 pounds. He never married, didn’t have children.
Wally was systematic about his bean growing. He always sprouted the seeds on a damp paper towel and planted six around a 15-inch diameter circle. He trained the plants onto a central trellis constructed from a tall stake with scrap wood nailed on. Caroline told me the beans are real easy to grow and produce lots of nice pods. She grows them in waves, so there’s always a fresh supply; that’s how she prefers eating them.
Later I searched a few online seed catalogs and discovered that some do indeed sell the Romano variety, also known as the borlotti, a flat green bean. The Roma bean is a sibling; a more distant cousin may be the flat wax pole bean I grew last summer called Gold of Bacau. The seeds of Romanos are often white or black, but Caroline’s are tan, with brown speckles and fat racing stripes.
Anyway, she sent me home with two of last summer’s pods. Back home, I put them in a damp towel to sprout, happy to do my part in propagating the bean and its history.
Which reminds me that I need to read Claire Cummings’ book about genetically engineered seeds.
7 comments
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July 9, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Katrina
Yes, you will appreciate Ms. Cummings book, Uncertain Peril. This is a wonderful story of passing on the seed. I love that you sprouted them with the paper towels like Wally did.
There’s another beautiful story of passing on seeds at the Thinking Stomach blog. She posted it a couple of months or so ago. You would like it. There’s some kind of generosity, kindness, I’m not sure what to call it that is associated with the passing on of seeds. At least the stories I’ve read or heard.
September 5, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Katrina
Would you be up for writing a review of Uncertain Peril for the Bookworming Blog? Email me from the sidebar at my blog and let me know. I have my fingers crossed. Twice.
September 11, 2008 at 10:15 pm
saving wally’s seeds « Eat Local Northwest
[…] seed earlier in the summer. Faithful readers will recall that her seed had been passed along by her dying neighbor Wally, who himself had gotten them from Italian immigrant pals in the early 1900s. I was so swept away by […]
September 13, 2008 at 6:10 am
saving wally’s romanos « Eat Local Northwest
[…] bean seed earlier in the summer. Faithful readers may recall that her seed was passed along by a dying neighbor named Wally, who himself got them from Italian immigrant pals in the early 1900s and grew them all his life. I […]
October 23, 2008 at 10:10 am
spicy noodles « Eat Local Northwest
[…] tinkering with the ingredients. This particular adaptation uses a little ground beef plus the meaty Romano beans that I grew from my friend Caroline’s seeds. The only thing I don’t tinker with is the […]
November 9, 2010 at 3:51 pm
don
how do i get some of wallys romano beans , not boleto beans
December 5, 2010 at 10:40 pm
audrey
Don, apparently ‘Romano beans’ encompass a whole family of flat-podded green beans, and you can get seed from many companies. Some like Territorial Seed and Fedco sell the beans as Roma II. Happy growing!