Purple vegetables are called natural beauty products; scatter a handful of seeds and they will grow as soon as they touch soil, producing a generous harvest.

By late September each year, it is once again time to harvest the "moth eyebrow bean." Of course, moth eyebrow bean is just what we call it here; I wonder what you call it in your area? Its scientific name is hyacinth bean. "Moth eyebrow" originally describes a woman's slender and beautiful eyebrows, and the hyacinth bean is also curved and long; although it is a bit plump, the comparison is still quite vivid.

What we grow a lot of here is a purple hyacinth bean. Compared with the white hyacinth bean, it has an extra purple color, and purple foods are themselves rich in natural anthocyanins and the trace element selenium, with strong antioxidant capacity, so they are called "natural beauty products." Eating them often can delay aging, and may also help improve immunity and have anti-cancer and anti-tumor effects.

As a vegetable that is relatively easy to grow and high-yielding, purple hyacinth bean is usually planted at the edge of the vegetable garden. After sowing the seeds and watering once, we leave it alone, and it basically survives as soon as it touches soil. It will keep climbing along a fence, and even without a fence, as long as there is a tree or something else to support it, it will climb up and keep growing, with some reaching 6 or 7 m high.

After that, there is no need to specially buy seeds to sow every year. Possibly from seeds dropped the previous year, it will grow again in a large patch in the same old place. So in rural areas we basically never specially plant this vegetable, nor do we water or fertilize it. We simply leave it alone, yet it grows a lot every year. If one family cannot finish eating it all, they give it to neighbors.

When we eat purple hyacinth beans, we mainly stir-fry them. Wash them clean and cut them into shreds, then stir-fry with fatty meat or pork belly with more fat. Hyacinth beans cooked this way, after rendering out the lard, are really very fragrant.

Growing purple hyacinth beans is very easy. It has strong adaptability and is also very tolerant of poor soil. Ordinary garden soil is enough to grow it. The most suitable growing temperature is between 18-30°C. It grows quickly in summer and sets fruit in September-October, but it is not tolerant of frost. Around November, when it turns cold, it will no longer set fruit.

Although purple hyacinth bean has extremely strong drought tolerance, it still needs appropriate watering during the growing period, watering when dry and letting it dry when wet, mainly keeping the soil slightly moist. Purple hyacinth bean itself has a very strong fruiting capacity. If sufficient base fertilizer is applied at the beginning of planting and then some farmyard manure and the like is applied as a top dressing during the growing period, it will become more high-yielding and higher in quality.