Grow Fresh Green Beans All Winter Long in a Sunny Window Inside Your Home

If you have a sunny window, you can grow green beans year-round. Let's show you how. Hey, Provident Preppers, I'm Jonathan. And I'm Kyleen, and welcome to our beautiful little indoor garden. You would be amazed at the amount of food that you can produce if all you have is a sunny window anywhere in your house. So if you live in an apartment, you're good. But today we're going to talk about how we are producing green beans. It's February, well, it's Valentine's Day. Yes, it is February 14th. And check out the fresh green beans we have while there's still snow outside. The green beans really love to be picked. So that's the cool thing about doing these green beans is it makes them happy and they produce more when you pick them. But you do want to make sure that you're starting some new plants about every month. They do have a limited time that they will produce, but you can just keep rotating them in and keep a continuous supply. Okay, you can only store so many dried goods, right? And the problem that we have are vitamin A and vitamin C. And green beans actually are a good source of both of those. So they're a great supplement as a survival food to your stored dry goods like your wheat and your rice and all that stuff. Now, when we're talking about beans, these are some from Survival Garden Seeds that we, it's a great company. These two are 50 days to maturity. So from the time you plant it till the time you harvest your first green bean, it's 50 days. But this one is 70. So my recommendation for growing indoors would be a bush bean. I wouldn't grow a pole bean, but a bush bean that produces in just 50 days. This one that's 70 days, you could do it if you wanted to, it's just a lot longer before you get your first green bean. Another thing about growing green beans indoors is that you've got all these green beans, the more you pick, the more green beans that the plant produces. But once these plants are done, beans and legumes are very high in nitrogen. And so all you have to do is cut these down and put them in your compost bin or use them as a mulch with your other garden produce or in your garden, and it will help your other plants grow much better. So that's a great thing about green beans. Now we talked about it being just a sunny window, but I want to show you a little comparison that we did. So behind you, we actually have shelves that have grow lights on them, where we're able to grow a lot more food and we're able to start our seedlings that are going to go out into our garden in the springtime. But do you see this little guy right here? This was grown under the grow lights and the grow lights that this was under, they're actually professional grow lights. But can you see these green beans? They are not as happy. The coloring isn't as good. This plant isn't as vital. These are the green beans that were produced by the plants. And there are two plants here. I planted four seeds in each of these pots. This one, three germinated. But there's no reason to just have only one in this pot. We've discovered that the sunny window actually produces healthier plants. Yeah, they do look better and they produce better. Yeah. Now this one may look a little bit yellow to you, but this one is actually a different variety. This is a yellow bean. So this plant is actually supposed to look this way. And it was in the sunny window. You can do this as beautifully or as economically as you want to. This right here that's holding these two pots, see that? That is just a container. I think it probably had some bakery products or something from Costco in it. I don't remember to tell you the truth. Experiment with this. So hold on and we'll get it set up so we can show you how to actually plant some more. We're going to show you how easy it is to do this. Now, first thing that I did is I filled these with moistened potting soil. You can reuse the soil unless you have like gnats in it or you're having some kind of an insect problem. If you do, it's better to get fresh soil or you can put it in the oven at a really low temperature so that you don't kill the soil, but you make sure that the little gnats aren't growing it anymore. Put the potting soil in there. You see what John's doing? He's just planting the seeds. Bean seeds should be planted about an inch deep and covered with soil. It's important to label them just because I will forget what kind I planted. And then I put them in a sunny window. I will water them usually twice a week. They're pretty forgiving. Just make sure that you continue to harvest. We talked about this before, but you're going to want to replant about every month. These, they take about 50 days to start actually producing and they will produce for about three weeks. So if you plant every month, then you should have almost a continuous supply of green beans. There's one other thing I should tell you about. We've had problems with this because when I water, the water will drain. You always need to have a little tray underneath and you need to make sure that that has enough capacity to catch the water. Some of my shelves are having a little bit of a hard time because I wasn't as careful as I should have been. All right, look at this wonderful harvest. These are beautiful green beans and they are going to be very delicious in a stir fry today. And we left a lot of the little ones still on the plant. So there'll be another crop coming here in a few more days. So this is exciting to me. Now make sure that you start with good quality seeds that are heirloom or open pollinated non-hybrid because that means that when you save the seeds from this, that you will be able to plant another one that is true to the parent. When it grows up, it's going to be the same thing as the parent plant. So how are we going to do that? So all I'd have to do with this is I want to take, like I would let it grow bigger than this. I want it to be very mature. You could either let it dry right like this. And then once it's all the way dry, you can pop those seeds out or you can pop them out and let them dry, whichever you prefer. Sometimes I'm a little bit lazy. So just putting some of these even on it right here in our little solarium, just putting them on a plate to dry it like a paper plate. Make sure you label it so you remember what it was. And then those seeds, you can just plant them again. Now, one of the other really cool things that we've done, and we just want to show you kind of some of what we're doing in here. These peppers were harvested while I dug them up just before the last fall frost. And then I brought them indoors. Now, I butchered them like I clipped them back till they were just pretty bare. In fact, I have a whole video on that. But these peppers will produce all winter long for us. And then in the spring, I'll prune them back again and I will plant them out in the garden as soon as there's no more danger of frost because peppers like the heat and are very unhappy if they get cold. Now, these are peas. There's some sweet peas and they're just barely now starting to produce. And I'm super excited about this one because this pot, actually, it's a canner that got a hole in it. Yeah. I just put more holes in it. Just put more holes in it. And now it's something else. It got repurposed. Yeah. And that's part of this. We don't want it to cost much money. And this cage thing that's on top, that was an old little laundry hamper thing that we had that had a little liner in it. But the liner had got torn and broken. And instead of throwing the whole thing away, we decided that we'd just use this to trellis the peas on because that's really important for the peas. Now, above us, what you see hitting our heads all the time are these yellow cherry tomatoes. They're sun sugar and they're amazing. And I cloned them before the last frost. So when you clone it, all you do is you go and I don't see a place right here, but you just take a cutting from one of the ends and I strip off the bottom leaves and I put it in water and then it will root itself. And as soon as the roots look strong and healthy, I put them in soil and they grew these plants, which, you know, that's amazing. Another way that you can be self-sustaining. Didn't even use any seeds and sun sugar tomatoes are hybrid, but they're my favorite. And so we have to kind of get around that because the seeds aren't going to produce the same tomato, but the plant will. So we encourage you to take a small, steady step and try this out and get excited about it. And I don't know if you'll ever be as excited as mama is, but it does, it does get addicting and it is exciting. Our challenge is that you grow something. Find a window where there's enough light to grow something and grow something. Beans are a great, super easy thing to start with, but something. So the question of the day, what are you going to grow so that you can be just a little bit more self-reliant and have the incredible satisfaction that we have when we eat this food? There's something just amazing knowing that you grew it yourself and something super special when you know you did it in your own house. So thanks for being part of the solution.