They've Finally Got Their Finger Out!

Sheal, we don't freeze them anymore but we used to. We eat loads and I can sell as many as I can grow. The demand I have for them far outstrips the production, as I could easily sell 200lb a week.

When we used to freeze them we used to slice them, lengthways, with a slicer that cut them quite thinly. Then dropped them into a large pan of boiling water and brought it back up to a boil.
After about 10 seconds of boiling they were immediately removed and dropped into a bowl of cold water. Swished around in the bowl, using my hand, and then lifted out and dropped into another bowl of iced water. Left for a couple of minutes and then put into colanders, shaken to help the water drain out, spread fairly thinly (as thinly as possible) on to a tray and placed, open, in the freezer.
After they had been in the freezer an hour, or two (depending on how low the temperature was in the freezer), they had started to freeze nicely.
I then took the tray out and put the beans in bags sufficient for a meal. That way, the beans weren't a solid mass and when required for a meal could just be dropped into a pan of boiling water, brought back to the boil for a few seconds and served immediately.

If you just blanch them and then freeze them in a block they are not so good for eating. They freeze at different speeds (the inside of the block takes longer than the outside) and when you take them out you either have to let them defrost slowly (they can go soggy) or drop them, frozen, into boiling water where the beans on the outside of the block cook more than on the inside.

Quick freezing is the key to keeping the texture and flavour. We used to do it on a large scale and the tray we used was 5ft x 3ft and put into a very large chest freezer. We used to freeze loads of produce in those days.