The Pantry Staple You Can Easily Grow To Fill Your Garden With Fresh Crops

In the garden, we're always looking for shortcuts, hacks, and nifty tricks to grow more food for less money, such as regrowing plants like green onions from scraps, a great way to upcycle food waste. And there's another easy way to fill your garden with fresh food on a budget: Check your shelves, and if you have a bag of store-bought dried lima beans for cooking, you can use this pantry staple to grow as a crop in your garden. Lima beans (Phaseolus lunatus) grow on the vine in wide, flat pods that can be harvested dry on the vine or when the pods are still green for fresh shelling beans.

Whichever way you prefer to cook garden-harvested limas, bags of store-bought lima beans intended for cooking cost a lot less than those packaged as seeds, so if you're trying to grow a lot of food on a budget, this pantry staple will fill your garden with fresh crops fast. But before filling your entire garden with the contents of a pound bag of lima beans from the grocery store, there is something you should know: If the dried beans are very old, it's possible that not all of them will germinate. Luckily, it's easy to test seeds for viability before planting them to make sure you don't waste your garden real estate.

You can check to see if your store-bought lima beans from your pantry will germinate by placing several in a moist paper towel stored in a sealed plastic bag or glass container, and then placing the bag or container in a warm location, like on a windowsill. Keep the paper towel moist, and if none of the beans sprout within 18 days, you'll want to choose a fresher bag of lima beans to grow in this way. If most of the beans sprout, you'll know you can proceed with growing the lima beans as a crop – and this legume might easily become one of your favorite garden staples.

Since lima beans are a frost-sensitive crop, wait until a week after your last frost date to sow them in your garden. Also make sure the location gets six to 10 hours of direct sun each day. When sowing your pantry staple seeds, for better growth avoid planting lima beans near certain plants, such as alliums. Some types of lima beans need to be trellised, like Christmas lima beans, so if you know the variety in your store-bought pack, look it up to see if it's a pole type requiring a trellis or a bush type, which can grow without support.