Cherokee Trail of Tears

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!

These beans are amazing!! I planted them along a section of my garden fence and they did amazing! They were a mass of vines with "millions" of beans! I've been planting the black turtle bush beans, which are also great and mature earlier, but I don't get nearly as many beans for the space and effort. I wound up picking most of these in snowy January. It's great that I can just leave them on the fence to pick whenever. They were dry and didn't curl up and drop the beans before I could get to them like other varieties do. I cook them up with my dried runner beans and veggies and make a year's worth of burrito filling for the freezer. Plus I have lots of seeds to plant for the spring. Will definitely do a longer row this year! Love these!!