Cherokee Trail of Tears

I started growing beans and other things on my back balcony. I made a 10' x 10x trellis above the railing, bought some smart pots and started trying every variety of bean I could find. A local nursery owner even gave me a selection of her favourite pole beans, purple beans...very nice. Last year I bought a pack of Cherokee Trail and grew them alongside a bunch of other varieties. I noticed they performed better than anything else I had. I sorted out all the Cherokees from the rest of the beans (the shiny black seeds make them easy to spot) and decided I'd grow them exclusively this summer. OK...some were obviously cross pollinated, but most weren't. They have been spectacular. I have an impenetrable wall of beans and have filled 12 mason jars for the freezer already, despite eating a ton of the green suckers already. So I've ordered some fresh and will ONLY grow Cherokee Trail of Tears, for years to come. What a producer!

I tried an experiment this summer growing a 3 Sisters garden in a container using bean, corn, and squash varieties that were grown by American Indians. I am quite happy with the Cherokee Trail of Tears plants. They are producing well. The beans are wonderful to eat raw right off the vine. I grew them to dry for soup this winter. It's too early to say how much the final yield will be at this point, but I expect that I will be pleased, based on how much they have produced so far..

I grew these last summer\autumn and I think maybe seven came up. So I let them dry and I collected the seeds from them. I have an abundance of them now and they are doing fantastic.

These beans are my favorite! They are prolific - they are tasty as snap beans - they are tasty as dried beans - and the dried beans are beautiful. The first year I planted these, I had 10 seeds. They all grew and I let them all dry....I ended up with 1,500 beans!!! Are you kidding me? Ever since, I eat all the green beans I want and let the rest dry on the vine. The dried beans are amazingly delicious and satisfying that I grew them myself. Very easy to grow. Try them - you won't go back.

My husband is Native American, so I bought these mainly out of curiosity. We originally put up a simple stake and line trellis which we ended up reinforcing with t-posts because the vines were so vigorous and productive! It took a while for the beans to mature for our first picking, but they continued to bloom and produce all through summer. Fall hit and the vines began to look scraggly, but we got one more good harvest! They don't make good snap beans in our opinion, but they cook up very good and are great mixed with navy or other varieties also. We will plant these again for sure!