A two-dollar bag of pinto or black beans looks like dinner, not a packet of garden seed. But dried beans are mature seeds, which raises an irresistible frugal-gardening question: could you take a handful from the grocery bag, put them in the ground, and eventually harvest far more beans than you started with? The answer is yes—sometimes—and a 2026 University of Georgia experiment even managed to grow seedlings from ordinary store-bought pinto beans. The catch is that growing grocery store beans is much less predictable than planting seed produced and packaged specifically for gardening. If you’re willing to treat a few cents’ worth of beans as an experiment, however, this may be one of the cheapest gardening projects you can try.
