Steamed Beans For Dinner
September 16, 2010, Submitted by: KenPermalink
Having just harvested a handful of pole-beans to supplement a delicious meal today, I just had to comment on the great benefits of growing your own survival garden, even a small one. Along with several other vegetables, I have grown pole beans in several areas around the yard where I have ‘mini gardens’.
I have to mention the excellent benefits of growing beans. They are very good for the soil since they replenish it with nitrogen. Beans are also a very good source of survival protein, which will become absent from diets that rely only on meat for their protein during a bad SHTF survival scenario.
Your body actually needs less protein than many of us think. Recommendations vary for how much protein adult men and women need, and range from about 30 grams to at most 60 grams per day. Most of us consume way too much protein from eating too many and too large portions of meat. One cup of cooked beans will provide nearly 15 grams of protein along with beneficial fiber. Soy beans have the most protein.
I’m not a vegetarian, and I do enjoy eating meat in moderation, but when I think about survival preparedness during situations where the power will be out for a medium or long period of time, I realize that meat will be one of the first things to go (refrigerators and freezers will be without power, distribution systems will be mostly offline if not totally offline). If the crisis is one of the worst case scenarios that we sometimes discuss, then much of the available animal population will be harvested fairly quickly, the exception possibly being if you live in a really remote area – which is not where most of us live… In this example, meat and its protein benefits will be gone and one of your only survival protein sources may come from your garden or food storage.
A great advantage to eating beans, and vegetables in general, is for their healthy nutritional properties. Most of us know that most of us do not eat enough vegetables in our diet. I must say that there are a few things you can do to make it easier to move forward with your good intentions to eat more vegetables.
One motivator is to grow your own. Reason being, not only is it satisfying and practicing self-sufficiency, but the taste of home-grown vegetables can’t be beat. Seriously.
Another motivator is to get yourself a steamer and steam your vegetables. I have a Oster Food Steamer
. It is so easy to use and such an easy process. Cleanup is really quick and easy, plus the flavor is retained compared to other methods of cooking. The best thing about it is, steamed vegetables retain all of their nutrients and is one of the healthiest things you can eat and do for yourself.
I couldn’t resist making a short video of my delicious pole beans today as I steamed them in my Oster Steamer for dinner.
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The Best Survival Garden Food – Beans
August 30, 2010, Submitted by: Ken
Legumes are plants which produce pods which split open naturally along a seam, revealing a row of seeds. Legumes (beans) produce their own nitrogen, and in fact they return nitrogen back into the soil when they die off.
Beans are a great crop rotation plant to help maintain soil quality by replacing nitrogen back into the soil where the nitrogen has been depleted by other crops.
Beans are rich in fiber, protein, antioxidants, and are low in fat. Beans are a very good food for the human diet and can be a healthy substitute for meat which has more fat and cholesterol.
This year I have planted pole beans, a legume, wherever I had planted tomatoes last year. The plants continue to produce new beans throughout the entire growing season.
In my opinion, beans, of which there are many varieties, are one of the best survival foods to grow in a survival garden.
Beans are easy to grow and I suggest that anyone who is experimenting with growing their own garden be sure and learn to grow, harvest, and store beans. Most dry beans can be stored for years or even decades, helping to make them one of the best survival foods to keep in your preps.
I like the pole beans because they don’t take much square footage when you have a small garden. Instead, they grow tall and produce all the way up the vine, leaving space on the ground for other plants. I have used several trellis to assist their upward growth. I have seen pole beans growing up makeshift strings attached between a ground support and a higher support. I have also seen simple tee-pee structures built of small wood poles which nicely support the upward growth of the pole bean plants. I suspect that you could also plant them along side trees and they would follow the tree trunk upwards.
The bottom line is to strongly consider adding beans to your survival garden plans, due to their ability to add protein (and fiber and minerals) to your diet instead of meat, and their ability to restore nitrogen to the soil. I like meat just as much as the next person, but in TEOTWAWKI scenario, meat will be scarce and you will need some amount of protein in your diet.
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