Ooooh a big beautiful brown one waiting for a snack!
Overgrown green bean.
I’m guessing I’ma green bean that was left to fully mature. Let the green hulls dry out, shell the dry ones like any other bean, and cook them!
Looks like dragon tongue. Which is a determinate, French bean iirc.
I grew them a couple times from an heirloom company. Definitely more of a hybrid between dry bean/ and a fresh cut. Was a bit stringy and lost its tenderness before it got the cool splotches, which also didn’t stand up to cooking. I let some go to dry beans and they were far better that way, but in a small garden allotment, just not going to get enough to make it meaningful.
I think you may have grown a different bean. I grow Dragon Tongue beans every year as garden snacks and they look pretty different than the OP picture.
Check out the upper right. Might be more than one variety, but the more mature bean in the UR does sure looks like dragons tougne. I think we might have less mature or second flush beans in the foreground.
Thats also the company I got my seeds from (your link) , and they looked like the one in the UR.
Ah, yeah I see it now. That one in the upper right could possibly be a dragon tongue, but the green beans in the foreground 100% are not.
Immature pods on dt are skinnier, the purple is at its darkest, and they have a green tint. As they mature they lose the green and get more yellow between the purple, and when they’re fully mature the purple fades and they become almost completely yellow/white. I thought you might have grown a different bean because you described them as stringy and said they weren’t tender anymore by the time they developed their splotches, but my experience is that their splotches are darkest when they’re immature, and they stay tender without any stringiness until the seeds inside are developed enough for the pods to bulge. Could just be a difference in climate for all I know (I’m in the high desert).
Attached picture is a pile of dt bean pods I harvested in various stages of ripeness.
