Purple Beans?

Yes, purple beans.

A while back I bought a packet of Tri-Color Beans. Really, it was a packet that promised pole beans that were not just green, but also yellow and purple. I was really hoping to find yellow pole beans (a.k.a. "wax beans" -- that don't taste like wax, mostly just like green beans), but they only had green or this. So, I went with this.

I've now harvested a bunch of the beans and can give a review of them.

You'll notice that there are NO yellow beans. I have yet to see a-one. I've seen cream-colored bean flowers, yellow bean flowers, and purple bean flowers. But I've only seen purple and green beans.

Normal ol' green pole beans look like this.

But the intertwined purple and green (and yellow) vines are actually pretty cool looking.

You can see which vine is going to produce purple and which is going to make green (or yellow).  And this brings up a point about why I like yellow/wax beans. You can actually see the beans! Same deal with the purple beans. You can actually see the beans! With the green beans, they are the same color as the vine and the leaves and they frequently look just like the stems. This is not the case with the yellow and purple beans.

But here's my disappointment. The purple of the beans is only skin deep. No, really. Only about a single layer of cells are purple. When you snap and string them, the part that is snapped is green in cross-section and the part where the string was is also green. How disappointing.

But even more disappointing is that, upon steaming, the purple disappears and becomes a slightly duller green than the steamed green beans.

The two don't really taste any different from each other. However, you really need to stay on top of harvesting the purple ones even more than the green ones. The purple beans get much stringier and they get much, much woodier much faster. If you compare a green bean and a purple bean that have just gone past their prime, the green pod is a little tough, but the purple pod is woody. This is not a selling point for the purple beans unless you can stay on top of harvesting them daily.

IMHO, there are two reasons to opt for the purple beans:
The coolness factor -- purple beans look really cool... on the vine.
They're easier to find on the vine to harvest.

I think I'll spend some time this winter seeing what I can find in the way of yellow pole beans. They (and the green ones) are much more forgiving if you skip a day.