My beautiful friend, Jessica, and her adorable son, Benjamin, have really been inspiring me lately, they grew bean plants using only water, no soil. Sure, we’ve all sprouted beans before for a fun kitchen experiment but Jessica’s sprouts grew into bean plants. You can visit them at their blog Cattails & Cobwebs to see their sprouting beans, a link to the growing bean plant is farther into this post.
April 30- we started by soaking 10 beans in a shallow amount of water, this is what we had 2 days later.

May 2- from 10 to 8 seeds, 2 seeds didn’t sprout.

May 3- you can see leaf growth!

May 6- from 8 beans to 6, 2 more weren’t going to make it, but the 6 still alive seemed to be thriving on very little water.

May 8- we moved them to a larger dish so they could spread out, we probably should have moved them into a glass of water at this point, see the browning roots?

So beautiful!

May 12- with the roots starting to brown, I went to Jessica and found out that indeed, we should have put the sprouts into a glass of water; her soil-less sprouts turned into plants and one even grew a bean (see the bean plant growing here).

June 5- So, we try again, with garbanzo beans included this time! Hopefully some of these guys will live, at least one!

“That’s all,”
Lisa