Plant · P-233

Tepary Bean

Phaseolus acutifolius

Tepary Bean is a Sonoran Desert dry bean bred at Texas A&M AgriLife as a low-input dryland crop that needs no irrigation, the best-adapted bean in this collection for a hot summer. Mature dry seed goes into soups or gets ground to flour, parched or fried, with young pods, sprouts and leaves also eaten, though raw seed is toxic and must be thoroughly cooked, which destroys the toxin completely. It fixes nitrogen through root nodules and, unusually for a garden bean, makes genuinely good livestock forage, with a nutrition profile that beats cowpea and guar. It can crop in as little as two months on nothing but residual soil moisture from seasonal rain and shrugs off 100 F heat, but cold, not heat, is what kills it - night temperatures below about 46 F end the plant.