First indications that my purple peacock plants might produce this year.
Sermon 89 - Purple Peacock
John 12:24
Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
I have never actually bought seeds for purple peacock beans. I was given four pods by a fellow gardener one time. Instead of eating the beans, I opened up the pods, extracted the beans, dried them, and later used them as seed.
Purple peacock beans grow, cook up, and can be eaten like green beans. They have a slightly tougher outer skin, and a slightly milder flavor. The outer skin is purple, but, if you cook the beans, some of the purple color disappears, and you tend to end up with either a mottled or striated mix of purple and green, which can be quite colorful depending upon the recipe you cook them in.
A couple of years ago I planted some purple peacock beans in a mixed garden patch. I planted two of the seeds beside two very large sunflower plants. I had a large number of poles stuck randomly around the garden. Purple peacock plants grow quickly and prolifically, generating a large number of tendrils, and twining around and over pretty much everything. They spend a long time producing vines and leaves, and it's only after a few months of producing vines and greenery that you finally get a few small purplish flowers.
I have, elsewhere, written a sermon or devotional about broad beans as an example of God's Providence. Purple peacock beans don't produce edible material in quite the same variety as broad beans do, but purple peacock beans definitely surpass broad beans in terms of actually producing food.
I probably planted five purple peacock plants in that mixed garden. The greenery overtook pretty much the entire garden. When once the beans started to produce, I probably took, at a conservative estimate, five kilograms of beans off each plant. I could have taken more, if I had allowed the pods to grow to their full size, and if I had maintained a regular schedule of harvesting later into the season.
Jesus once spoke a parable about the importance of sacrifice, even the sacrifice of your own life. He noted that a single seed was not very much, but that, when planted in the ground it died, but then produced a harvest, of thirty, or sixty, or even a hundred times the original grain. The purple peacock beans that I planted outdid that by a considerable margin. Each seed was approximately two grams in size. Each plant produced at least five kilograms of food. That's a 2500 times increase.
We can find other, even more prolific, examples. An apple seed, less than a gram, can produce a tree which, after a few years, yields dozens of kilograms of apples every year. And, of course, I have also, elsewhere, noted that God doesn't seem too concerned with efficiency. God provides for us profligately, showering abundance on us.
Garden series
Sermon 2 - Broad Beans
Sermon 3 - Blackberries
Sermon 33 - Transplanting
Sermon 57 - Leaven
Sermon 59 - Corn
Sermon 83 - The Years the Locusts Have Eaten
Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html
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