I always plant more green beans than I need to, but this year it was my salvation rather than a burden.

By mid-July, the daily ritual of picking beans is in full swing. Ordinarily, I begin to feel overwhelmed about a week into the routine, but this year the rabbits destroyed enough of my crop that I’m left with about half of what I planted, which looks like it will be the right amount to keep my family eating beans for several weeks.

This is a new experience. By the third week in July, I usually have a crisper drawer full of beans, and I can’t give them away or eat them up fast enough. In years when I have a particularly enormous crop, I will even toss some of the excess in the freezer.

At some point, after my family is tired of eating beans and my back begins to rebel, I usually am relieved to stop picking. This year will be different.

With the smaller crop I have this year, my daily harvest is going to range from 1 to 2 pints. I’ll hit the high end of the range when the pole beans come on in about 10 days.

Right now I’m picking purple bush beans. The seed is sold most commonly as Royal Burgundy or Royalty Purple. I love having these beans in the garden. The plants are gorgeous, with purple blooms and often with purple ribs against the dark green of the leaves.

As it happens, my bean plants are particularly lush this year since I took a reader’s advice and sprinkled blood meal up and down the rows to dissuade the rabbits from dining there. The rabbits were not terribly impressed, but my plants grew several inches overnight.

While the violet blooms add a dash of color to the garden, the beans themselves also are purple, which makes them much easier to pick against the green leaves. I find that as I age, these things become more important. My latest entry on the list of “You know you’re middle-aged when” is that you have to take your reading glasses to the garden when you check for bugs or pick green-on-green vegetables.

Happily, purple beans can be seen with the naked – and aging – eye.

As they cook, the purple bean pods lose their color. Once the green pole beans are ready to pick, I will be able to mix them in the pot and no one will be the wiser.

Healthy, reasonably watered plants will continue to set new pods into early August as long as the existing pods are picked regularly. Eventually, the plants get tired and the pods begin to turn tough. On most varieties, pods should be picked after the beans form inside but before the outlines of the beans can be seen on the outside of the pod.

The exception is shelling beans, which will be removed from the pod for cooking. Lima beans, for example, can be left in the pod longer, although you don’t want them to wait so long that they lose their creamy texture.

Beans that will be dried can be picked and dried in the pod. It’s also handy to leave the last round of pods to dry on the plants. Once the beans inside the pods have thoroughly dried, the shelling can begin. Done by hand, this is a time-consuming, labor-intensive and thankless chore that I have endured just once.

I thought it would be interesting to grow my own black turtle beans, so I planted about 50 feet of them. I got a crop, by golly, but it provided a graphic illustration of agricultural economics. From that harvest and several afternoons of shelling, I wound up with about 2 quarts of beans.

Next time you’re in the supermarket, check the price on a bag of black beans and tell me whether it was worth the time and trouble.