PEIYellow beans have established themselves as a firm farm favourite on P.E.I. over the years, according to three gardeners who gathered for a recent CBC Mainstreet panel. P.E.I.’s red soil deserves credit for the beans tasting better, suggests a Stratford growerRyan McKellop · CBC News · Posted: Aug 24, 2025 5:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 5 hours agoYellow beans have been known to cause lineups among Islanders, even when still in seed form, members of a CBC Mainstreet panel agreed. (Ryan McKellop/CBC)Yellow snap beans have established themselves as a firm farm favourite on P.E.I. over the years, according to three gardeners who gathered for a recent CBC Mainstreet panel. Shari MacDonald of the Rural Municipality of Miltonvale’s community hall, which also runs a community garden, said members of a coffee club she attends had to get to the store early this year to get their hands on some yellow bean seeds.”We had a couple of people last year… that was the complaint. At one point last year they were like, ‘Did you get any yellow bean seeds?’ ‘I couldn’t get any. Did you get any?'” she said.”And then this year it was like, ‘The first thing I bought, I went really early and I got yellow bean seeds.'”Mainstreet PEIWhat’s the deal with yellow beans?Across the Island, the signs are everywhere: new potatoes and yellow beans. Sheryl MacKay speaks with Tania MacKenzie of MacKenzie Produce, Shari MacDonald of the Rural Municipality of Miltonvale’s community hall, and gardener Ryan Ritskes to find out what makes yellow beans such a summertime favourite.MacDonald said she asked some people around the town hall where the popularity could come from.”What they told me was they’re great with butter and salt, they have a milder flavour than green beans, they’re more tender, they look pretty on the plate, they taste like summer,” she said.”And they kind of look like french fries… You can pick them up and eat them like french fries, so that’s good. And there’s nothing better than a big plate of beans with butter and salt on them.”Shari MacDonald says members of her coffee club can’t get enough of those yellow snap beans. (Shane Hennessey/CBC)Tania MacKenzie of MacKenzie Produce in Stratford agrees. She said yellow beans, called wax beans in some places, are traditional to P.E.I. summers.”Us Islanders are crazy. I think it’s associated with the summer season and traditional P.E.I. way of life. Basically it’s like a generational thing that’s been passed down,” she said.”We have lots of yellow beans and whenever they’re ready customers are excited to purchase them. It goes hand and hand with new potatoes.”MacKenzie said her mother, who recently passed away, and her father grew up eating the popular food.”She was 80 and I know they grew up with it… being just, you know, crazy for yellow beans when yellow bean season began. So it’s gotta be a few generations, like four maybe, three or four.”Tania MacKenzie of MacKenzie Produce in Stratford says yellow beans grown on P.E.I. just taste better, like most other kinds of produce. (Brian Higgins/CBC)One reason why the yellow bean is so loved here might be the province’s famous iron-rich red soil, she speculated.”Anything grown in our soil — it just seems to taste different, taste so much more better.”Adjusting to what the P.E.I. market wantsRyan Ritskes is running the Miltonvale community garden. Not being from the Island, he said he was surprised to see the love for the yellow bean here.”I’m a market gardener and so we grew a large amount of beans. And coming from not P.E.I., I grew a lot of green beans and some yellow beans,” he said. “Everyone was just fighting over the yellow beans and didn’t even want the green ones. And I was just surprised by that.”He said once he realized the demand he knew what he had to do.”We planted a second timeline of just yellow beans as soon as this sort of became a thing. I was like, ‘Well, we gotta have yellow beans…'”New potatoes and yellow beans is what people are talking about, what they want from the garden.”ABOUT THE AUTHORRyan McKellop is a graduate of the Holland College Journalism program and a web writer at CBC P.E.I.With files from Mainstreet P.E.I.
What makes yellow beans such a summertime favourite among Islanders?
