On 14/10/2012 09:48, David in Normandy wrote:

The important thing that others haven't mentioned is to keep the bean
seeds in a cool, dry airy place over Winter. I once made the mistake of
putting them into a sealed plastic tub and the following Spring it was
just a rotting mass.

It will work if the beans are thoroughly dry. I put mine into a sealed
glass jar after making sure that they are dry and I haven't had any
problems.

The reason for doing this is to prevent mice getting at them. In this
house the mice will eat anything, whether edible or not. Last winter
they ate the numbers off my phone as well as the labels off pots of jam,
even the plastic bottle tops. In the past they gnawed their way through
a plastic bottle of linseed oil! Can you imagine the mess? In spite of
having our cats over here for a month in the summer, and they caught up
to five mice/voles per day, they don't seem to have made any inroads
into the population because they have had a lot of my grapes. How do I
know it was mice? Because I found their secret store of grapes and grass
seed behind one of my shutters. My wife says that they were planning to
make some sort of whisky!

David (also in Normandy at the moment)

--
David Rance writing from Le Mesnil Villement, Calvados, France
http://rance.org.uk