Beans past and beans to come

This, belatedly, is my last Tiny Tuesday photo for January on the theme of hope - thank you for hosting, Pink Haired Lady, I liked this theme. It's not as tiny as some, but I have been going through my saved seeds and seeing what I need to order. I won't be sowing beans till spring, but I try to start tomatoes and aubergines indoors by the first week in February, as they take so long to get going. I love sowing vegetable seeds, especially the first of the year, as it always feels like a gesture of hope and faith in the future - faith that they will grow, and that we will harvest, eat and preserve them.

These are beans we harvested two years ago - last year's bean crop was hopeless. I like to save seed, and the beans we grow do tend to come true, though I will probably buy some new seed as well. The brown ones are borlotti beans, the climbing variety called Firetongue with beautifully coloured pods which change as they ripen and dry from green streaked with pink to creamy yellow with deep red-brown markings. They are the prettiest of beans too, pale greenish cream speckled with pink if we pick them to eat fresh, and drying through beiges and pinky browns to this rich, speckled brown as they age. The larger cream ones are cannellini beans, and the little ones are fine dwarf green beans called Compass. We grow the borlottis and cannellinis to dry, but they need a good summer and reasonably dry autumn to ripen enough - last year was our worst since we moved here, but every spring I begin again with optimism.