Purple King Snap Beans

I have always been interested in growing vegetables that are not common or look different from the usual ones that we buy from the market and eat on our dinner tables. This peculiar fetish of mine started since young and one of the unconventional edibles that I am fascinated with is the purple coloured snap bean. The usual snap beans we see and eat are green in colour.

With the help from C. C. Lee Marketing and Services who is the current sole distributor for Yates Seeds Australia early last year, I managed to get my hands on some ‘Purple King’ snap bean seeds. ‘Purple King’ is a climbing snap bean cultivar that produces purple coloured pods. The seeds were then given to one of my community gardeners, Mr Lim, who at that time sown and grew them successfully in one of the plots in my community garden.

Growing purple coloured snap beans was a new experience for me and my community gardeners. We noticed an interesting phenomenon that was not observed in conventional snap beans – the leaves of this purple podded snap bean had a tinge of purple on them! We were also happy to know that ‘Purple King’ was a very vigorous and rather disease resistant snap bean cultivar which quickly covered the entire trellis. The support that was made of out laundry bamboo poles and nylon strings became a ‘tent’ of leaves in just about a month!

The flowers of this cultivar, we noticed, were either pinkish or purplish, depending on how one perceives them. Although they were small like all other snap bean flowers, the large numbers of flower sprays that appeared amongst the foliage made them quite visually appealling because they punctuated the uniform green canopy of leaves. As one can see from the picture above, many flowers are produced on a single spray and these usually resulted in pods being produced. Our verdict was that ‘Purple King’ is a very rewarding snap bean cultivar to grow under our local conditions as it is a very heavy cropper.

After the flowers fade, the snap bean pods started developing. They would all appear like little thin rat tails that stuck out of the green calyxes that were left after the petals fell off. As they grow, these young snap bean pods elongated as well as fattened up. In the case of ‘Purple King’, while this usual process was occurring, the pods had an additional thing that was happening alongside. The pods at the beginning were green and they gradually took on a purple cast as one can see from the pictures, one above and the other below this paragraph of text.

My community gardeners like our snap beans young and tender and we started to harvest them when they were about 10 cm long. By then, the pods had turned completely purple. The purple colour of the pods made them stand out against the greenish foliage which actually facilitated the harvesting process and we hardly miss out harvesting any snap bean pods from the vines of this cultivar!