Sometimes i adore when both ultra frugal and yet foolish things cross over my facebook feed LOL

This fits the bill perfectly!

On the frugal side of things, in the usa this appear to cost around $2.50 cents and i would need to go to walmart locally to see if i can find it and price point it out but lets just say its 3.50. Pretty sure it higher then that but i am rounding.

So the first thing to note is that the company itself recommends that you CAN in fact sprout out their beans from this soup mix, and that it can be done as a class project and so on in a cheap and frugal way!

NO, i am not getting any kind of kickback or gift for this post lol and i will point out that i often buy bulk bags of mung beans for sprouting from the store because they cost me a fraction of what “sprouting mung beans” would and that they are excellent.

    Photo credit goes to Monique Salinas for the sorted beans out of her bag she got.

Now on one hand these are the most common planted beans and if you planted them all and grew them out, the yield back would pay for itself and then some.

IF you are in need of a massive amount of freshly picked young green beans, then the odds are in your favor on this project, plant away and harvest, harvest, harvest.. For someone that really wants to harvest first picks only of very young beans for a road stand or youth group etc.. then honestly you are not going to get cheaper then this without using a seed library or a free seed program on a seedy Saturday table,

And with seed prices rising and the amount you get in the seed packages in many cases going down, its a viable choice for those in need!! Maybe you have a very long mild growing season, then in that case you can most likely bring some of these back to full mature and dry bean stage again.

Now for the foolish part of this

1. Beans are one of the easiest plants to grow, give them soil, light and space and something to climb and they are good.. and they are also one of the most staple for gardeners to save. So the odds are good that if you ask on facebook to your local friends if they have custom grown local saved seed, the answer will be yes and you can get some gifted to you easily enough. 
2. Not all beans are a good choice for fresh eating and many of the beans shown in the soup bean mix will have not been bred to be stringless. While you can sit and snap and pull the string if you need to, when it come to eating and selling fresh eating beans, everyone today will assume stringless. My generations still remembers sitting, top and tailing and pulling the string of the back end for many hours.
3. Without knowing the seeds themselves there is no way to know how many days to harvest and how many days to dried. In short seasons and for those that like to do two plantings per garden season, this is critical

To be fair, it would only take one season of growing to get some of the answers, most dried beans can be eaten at a very young stage, you can pull the string on the beans if you need to do so and you could grow them out and track their timings.. So with a bit of work you could get your answers for most things listed above.

So for those that are looking for a cheap way to get seeds started for a homeschool project or a community garden, this looks like it could be a good choice

For those that are so lean this year and REALLY need to stretch their funds and grow some of their own food or who want to pay very little to grow trap crop, this is a great way to make it happen and i expect the yield return would be very high indeed compared to buying each of those types of seeds.

However for those that want to know what they are growing, want to know how much of a climber it is, want to know if its stringless, want to know how many days to dried stage.. Its a good idea to start with bought seed if you can and grow your own

So what do you think? Ultra frugal way to get into the garden game with some of the easiest plants to grow? Would you do it? If so what would get you to try this? Have you tried this? IF so how did it work? What was your results?