Sitaw or Yardlong Beans or String Beans

We've been finally harvesting Sitaw or Yardlong Beans lately. They are also called String Beans. The seeds of these plants came from a gardener in Los Banos Laguna when we went there May of this year. The lavender flowers come in pairs. Here, I'm showing one of the flowers.


In the photo below, the flowers are gone and the seed or bean pods will be sprouting from the top. The horizontal wire is part of the trellis I built upon which the vine is growing.


Here is a pair of young yardlong beans. Although ready to be harvested, this young pair will still grow.


Ahh. String beans galore! This plant is growing on the vegetable garden trellis I built.

You can still see the silver-colored bracket underneath the leaves on the right.


Here's a bit of info from Wikipedia:

Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis, the yardlong bean, is also known as the long-podded cowpea, asparagus bean, snake bean, or Chinese long bean. It is known as dau gok in Cantonese, jiang dou (豇豆) in Standard Mandarin, thua fak yao (ถั่วฝักยาว) in Thai and kacang panjang in Indonesian and Malay, sitaw in Tagalog, utong in Ilokano, bora in the West Indies and vali, Borboti in Bengali, India, eeril in Goa, India or đậu đũa (Vietnamese, literally: chopstick bean).

Despite the name, the pods are actually only about half a yard long; the subspecies name sesquipedalis (one-and-a-half-foot-long) is a rather exact approximation of the pods' length.

This plant is of a different genus than the common bean. It is a vigorous climbing annual vine. A variety of the cowpea, it is grown primarily for its strikingly long (35-75 cm) immature pods and has uses very similar to that of a green bean. The pods, which begin to form just 60 days after sowing, hang in pairs. They are best if picked for vegetable use before they reach full maturity. The plant is subtropical/tropical and most widely grown in the warmer parts of Southeastern Asia, Thailand, and Southern China.

Yardlong beans are quick-growing and daily checking/harvesting is often a necessity. The many varieties of yardlong beans are usually distinguished by the different colors of their mature seeds.