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.'"

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."

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."

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 wants

Ryan 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."