Age: pre-1970
My supplier: Heritage Seed Library
Pros: beans are large and go through beautiful colour changes
Cons: string! string! string!
Black Magic is a macho runner bean. The pods are easily capable of growing over a foot long, the beans are massive and a hard glossy black when dried. But if you want to eat them as conventional runner beans you have to get in there quick and harvest them while the pods are very small. Otherwise you'll be chomping on a mouthful of green gristle. To say that the pods are stringy is an understatement.
Personally I don't think the flavour is anything special either. The pod flesh is juicy and succulent but coarse in texture and taste. I was not impressed.
Inside the pods the beans start off green and turn deep pink as they start to swell, and then go a gorgeous midnight blue before maturing to jet black. It's only by shelling them that these colour changes can be appreciated, but they are very, very beautiful. The dried black beans are a delight to look at and handle.
In the end I gave up trying to eat the pods and just used this variety for shelling out. It may not be the conventional way to eat runners, but I found that leaving the beans to reach a mature size and discarding the stringy old pods is the most rewarding way to use it. The beans have a texture very similar to butter (lima) beans ... they're substantial and delicious to eat. You can eat them while they're still small and pink or leave them to the midnight blue stage. As is so often the case though, the colour doesn't survive the cooking process. On contact with boiling water the beans turn an inky mauve regardless of what colour they were to start with.
In the garden the plants were moderately attractive, having some red veining in the leaves and stems, and nice orangey-red flowers. But the usual runner bean glut never materialised. I probably didn't grow mine in the most advantageous position, but even so, the yields were very low. Mine also performed poorly in flower production, although pod set was good on the few flowers it did produce.
So on the whole I was disappointed with Black Magic. It has size and looks but the pod flavour doesn't match up to it. And although it certainly has merit as a shelling bean, the primary purpose of runner beans is eating the whole pods and it's no fun to find yourself chewing what feels like a mouthful of wire wool. It might appeal to exhibitors who are looking to grow enormously long pods but not necessarily to eat them.
It may not be fair to judge its lacklustre performance this season because I know several other bloggers (and my neighbour) had problems with their runner beans in 2006, so the poor yields may not be anything to do with the variety. I might be inclined to give it another go just to see, but probably not just yet ... I think there are other better varieties out there.
4 comments:
That dreaded word : string! Nothing worse than a stringy (runner) bean pod. I've several bagsin the freezer and I know some are stringy as I was greedy harvesting at the end of the season. Now it's like veg roulette whenever I cook a bag - please no string tonight!
Hahahaha ... sorry, I'm only laughing at how you describe it, I have every sympathy.
We grew what looks like the bean you have here- lots of pretty orange flowers and long , flat green pods that are sort of fuzzy. Of course I forgot to save or write down what variety they actually were!Anyway, it is getting chilly here and the beans & vines are so heavy they have actually pulled over the bamboo stake 'tepee' that held them up all summer, so we'e picked them off and are going to compost the vines.
I thought the pods seemed sort of stringy too, but our beans are not that big, and pink. Did yours turn dark IN the pod or after you picked them?? We ate some in the pods in August, but they were smaller and sweter then. I think we will just shell these and I'll cook them up like butter beans. :) Gardening is a fun adventure!!
This was the first year I’ve ever grown them. I heard the nitrogen from them help corn grow, instead they strangled them. I never saw such beautiful flowers, and the vines grew 8 ft and plus. Had tomato cages that were just entwined. However, my crop was very large, and unfortunately I haven’t been able to eat anything from my garden d/t esophageal cancer so I’ve had to sell most of my produce that I couldn’t pickle or can. I’ve recently been picking my beans and they are a beautiful purple/black color. Not sure what to do with all of them as they take up about 1/8 of my 60’ x 60’ garden. I will definitely keep some for myself as I should soon be able to eat a mushy bean after they dry. But I’ve had a vegetable stand out front because I can’t eat pretty much anything in there. So if I were to sell the beans, how much should I charge and for how much? I never like to overcharge because I like to be kind to others if they can’t afford it.
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