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bush beans

Seed Saving — Heirloom Bush Beans

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After eating beans for a few weeks from my early August planting of Aunt Joanie beans, I have let the rest of the bean pods mature on the plants. The ripe (old, pale, tough) pods are not good to eat, but the beans are good to save for planting next year.

Mature bean pods for seed-saving. PHOTO/Amygwh

Mature seeds set aside for drying. PHOTO/Amygwh
Beans for seed-saving need to be fully developed, which means they are at the stage when you might use them as dry beans in the kitchen. 
In drier climates, mature bean pods can be left on the plants until they are “rattle dry”. The pods will be brown and brittle and easy to shell out.
Here in the Southeastern US, we are not having the kind of dry weather that allows for bean pods to dry to brittleness. Instead, we are having the kind of humidity and rain that encourages mildews and fungi.
That means I am shelling out leathery pods, not brittle ones, and the beans still are plump with moisture.
Also, some of the pods are mildewed.
When I shell out the mildewed pods and find  unblemished bean seeds, then those beans can be saved for seeds. I don’t save seeds that look infected or damaged, because I don’t want to have my whole next crop be ruined by a fungus.
I also don’t save seeds from pods that contain fewer than three seeds inside. I don’t want to encourage plants that produce puny bean pods, and I am pretty sure that if I saved seeds from a lot of short pods, soon enough my entire crop would mostly have short pods.
Diseased seeds will not be saved. See the spots? PHOTO/Amygwh

Before storing the bean seeds for planting in another season, they need to be very dry. I leave the seed beans out on the counter to dry for several days (or more) until they are so dry that one hit by a hammer shatters instead of smashes.

As they dry, these beans will get smaller, and they also will turn to a gentle tan color. They really are beautiful beans!

When the seed-beans are very dry, I will make an envelope for them, label with the season they were grown in (Joanie Beans, Aug-Oct 2017), then store them in one of my airtight containers in the fridge. Next year, or even five or six or more years from now, these seeds will still be good for planting.

Bush Beans – A Quick Crop

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I planted a little patch (about 2 x 3 feet) of heirloom Aunt Joanie Beans in the first week of August, and today I harvested the first beans from that patch. That puts the days-to-maturity (or days-to-harvest) at about 50 days for this variety of beans. There are not many vegetable crops that can be brought to the kitchen so quickly!

First harvest of Joanie Beans from an early August planting.

This first day’s harvest is not enormous, I know, but after I washed and snapped the beans you can see in the picture, they measured a little more than a cup and a half. That is enough for two people to enjoy at suppertime.

If there were more of us here to split the harvest with, I would tuck these into the fridge and keep adding more each day until there were enough saved up.

The little plants have many more beans and flowers on them, at various stages of development, so more beans are definitely on the way! By tomorrow, an amount of beans similar to what I brought in today should be ready to pick.

The first frost for my yard does not usually arrive until the beginning of November, so we will be able to harvest beans from this patch for several weeks.

What are you harvesting this week?

The Summer Garden Looks Toward Fall

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We are just about at the mid-summer crossover point, when many of the summer vegetables are either at or just beyond their peak of productivity.  Pepper plants are loaded with ripening fruit, tomatoes are almost flying into the kitchen, zucchini plants have been felled by the borers after piling up lots of squashes, winter squashes are big and beginning to turn from green to tan. You get the idea.

We’ve made pickles with some of our cucumbers, and we have hot peppers fermenting in jars on the counter for a Tabasco-style sauce. In addition, the dehydrator has been busily turning slices of tomatoes into chips that we can re-hydrate in winter for use in cooking. The dry tomato-chips are a great snack, too.

Meanwhile, the okra pods have only just begun to come into the kitchen. Those plants are typically slow-starters, but they will produce until frost.

Over the past weekend, I pulled out lettuces that had been left in the garden to produce seeds. I will be leading a seed-saving workshop next week (Thursday, at the Extension office), and I wanted to have lettuces for participants to see and pull seeds from. After clearing that garden space, I dumped on some more compost, mixed in an organic fertilizer that I hadn’t tried before, and planted seeds for a late patch of bush beans.

The pole beans we are eating from the garden now are Blue Marbut (find them in the pole/snap category on the linked page) and I LOVE these, but a friend (thank you, Kim!) gave me a little packet of Dragon’s Tongue bush beans to try, so those are what I planted. Hopefully, they will germinate and grow in this hotter-than-usual July. The seeds were in one of the beautiful packets from Hudson Valley Seed Library, so I can enjoy the artwork while I wait for my plants to appear.

The next space that opens up in the garden will be sown with buckwheat as a place-holder (some people would say “cover crop”) before re-clearing the space for a fall crop. Even though the weather will still be quite toasty, I am sure, mid-August is the time to get some of our cool-season crops seeded into the ground.

Almost Time for the Spring Planting Marathon

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April is the biggest planting month for home vegetable gardens around here, and getting everything done can be tough. First there’s the “waiting for the soil to warm up” part, and then there’s the rush to get as much as possible into the ground as soon as it is even remotely feasible.

I like to start with some bush beans because they are early producers. I usually am able to bring the first beans to the kitchen in May.

Right now, I have lettuces getting close to what I consider “harvest-able” size. I’m not a big fan of baby-sized lettuces, which means I end up waiting longer for the larger leaves. Some of the spring radishes are almost big enough to pull, but the spinach and beets are all still pretty small. In the longer-range category, most of the seed potatoes have sent up some green leaves, and the onion-family crops planted in October are all still looking good.

A couple of the garden beds in the side yard are ready for planting. I worked on those yesterday, along with hoeing and/or pulling weeds in most of the other beds. In what is probably a jumping-the-gun moment, I planted some seeds in one of those beds.

The dill and additional radishes aren’t at all early, but the little patch of bush beans and short row of cucumber seeds probably are. My reasoning was that seeds are relatively inexpensive, and I have more than I need this year. If we get a late frost and the little plants don’t survive, it won’t be a disaster. I can just replant those little sections. We are forecast to have rain for the next couple of days, which made the planting seem even more like a good idea — no dragging out the hose to water the seeds!

If it works, I will have a start on getting the garden planted. If we get as much rain as the weather-guys are suggesting, the ground will be too wet to do any more work in the garden for several days, but as the soil dries and warms up a bit later in the week, I will probably plant another little section with some kind of seeds.

Most of the transplants for tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and tomatillas won’t be planted out until I know for certain that the weather has warmed, but one tomato plant is already in the ground. All the seeds for that variety germinated, and I ended up with extra plants.

I’ll let you all know how it goes…

Not Quite Summer, Not Quite Fall

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Even though the summer harvest season is nearing its conclusion, there’s still a bit more out in the garden to bring in. Last night and tonight we have temperatures down into the forties (degrees F), which peppers and eggplants in particular don’t appreciate. Their leaves all looked a little droopy this morning, so I am guessing that it’s nearly time to pull those plants from the garden.

My eggplants haven’t done as well this year as last, but the peppers have been performing like champs in more gardens than just mine. Gardeners all over the county are just about bursting with joy over the peppers. I am pretty sure I’m not alone in having many bags of chopped peppers in the freezer and many jars of dehydrated pepper-bits on the pantry shelves to make sure we’re well-seasoned all winter long.

This massive storage of peppers is in addition to the numerous peppers that we have eaten grilled, stuffed with cheese, just “on the side” of a plate of salad, Mexican-style beans & rice, and (on a very good day) mole’ chicken.

My little family is enjoying its late-summer fling with green beans, too. The little patch that I planted in August, that got tromped through by the workmen who were paying more attention to our house repairs than where they were walking (hard to complain about that …), has provided quite a few meals-worth of beans. They’ve been delicious!

The fall-planted garden will be providing more food for us soon. I’m hoping for a little more seasonal-overlap than just radishes, but we’ll see how it goes. Hope everyone else’s gardens are doing well!

Tracking the Harvest: June

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My yard isn’t exactly in full sun. Most of it gets about an hour and a half in the morning, then it’s in shade until a little past noon. The side yard doesn’t get back into the sun until after 1 p.m. As a result, I don’t really expect to bring in spectacular harvests.

In spite of the shade, though, the June harvest from the yard was surprisingly large. The weights below are kilograms:

June
Bush beans, green
4.05
Zucchini
9.6
Peppers
2.5
Cucumbers
4.1
Tomatoes, green
3.25
Blueberries
10.05
Berries, misc.
0.7
Onions, bulbing
2.8
Tomatoes, ripe
0.4

June total 37.45 kg = 82 lb and 9 oz
Running total: Jan. through June =160 pounds, 4 ounces
That seems pretty amazing to me.  However, to put this into perspective,  John Jeavons, in the book How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, has put together a table that includes potential crop yields for comparison.
According to the table, average U.S. yields of bush green beans are 12.9+ pounds per 100
sq. ft. (based on U.S. Dept. of Agriculture statistics). That number represents conventional
agriculture production. Using Jeavons’ biointensive methods, the yields should be 30/72/108 pounds per 100 sq. ft., for beginning gardeners, good gardeners, and excellent gardeners with good soil and climate, respectively.

My 20 square foot patch of bush green beans that just finished production was in the
shadiest part of the veggie garden, and the harvest total from that patch was 5.45 kg,
which converts to 12 pounds 0.2 oz. This scales up to about 60 pounds per 100 sq. ft,
which is not quite as high a yield as a “good” gardener should achieve. However,
considering the shade, the pest pressure, and the weirdness of the weather, I don’t think I
can complain about the bean harvest.

Garlic! Potatoes! Etc.!

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The garlic and potatoes, both in the same bed, have been looking pretty miserable for a while now, so I finally dug them all up. The harvest was a big (emphasis on Big!) surprise. The Rabun County garlic is the pile of big bulbs on the left in the picture:

It’s a little hard to tell from the very busy photo, but a couple of those Rabun County bulbs are almost four inches in diameter. Needless to say, I’m “pleased as Punch.” Most of the rest of the harvest turned out well, too, although the Elephant garlic was disappointingly average.  I haven’t weighed the bulbs yet. I’m going to leave them out on the shady front porch for a couple of days to dry out a little, then finish trimming the bulbs (I already trimmed off the rootlets).

I had been thinking that the potato harvest would be pathetic, considering the weather this spring, but it wasn’t. I ended up with a little more than eighteen pounds of spuds from my two five-foot rows. The two rows were crammed into a space that is only about two feet wide, and I had thought, at planting time, that maybe I should just be planting one row in that narrow space, but there I was with extra seed potatoes and only a little space.

The White Cobbler was a lot more productive than the Red Pontiac, but that may be a result of the warm spring. I think White Cobbler tolerates the heat a little better.

The basket to the right in the picture above contains the tiny harvest from the multiplier onions. I plant these every year, in spite of the lack of robust productivity, on the chance that, one of these years, I will figure out exactly the right combination of everything to make these work for me. It is possible that our winters are just too warm for them, but the notion of being able to replant onions each year without actually having to buy sets or starts of any kind is appealing enough that I am not giving up yet.

In other news, this is yesterday’s harvest from the garden:

It still seems insanely early to be bringing in zucchini, but here they are!

And in yet other news, a couple of the baby bunnies will be heading off to new homes this week. Einstein (black with a white head) will be going home tomorrow afternoon, and Louie (the brown-with-silvering baby, soon to be called Darwin), will be heading toward his new home on Wednesday.

Since they are only about nine weeks old, this all feels like progress!

We plan to keep a white bunny (Burrito), as a companion for Mama Moonpie, but the other white (Tiny) and the black and white one (Holstein) that is almost like a Dutch breed bunny still need a home.

To get them all together for a group photo, I dropped a handful of alfalfa hay into the middle of their Timothy hay. They love alfalfa hay!

When the crowd has thinned out some, it will probably seem strange to be able to sweep the bunny enclosure without having two or more babies hopping into the dust pan, another one chasing the broom, and one or two others trying to sit on my feet, but I am sure I will get used to it.

Summer is Busting Out All Over

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While I was gone again to Oklahoma (for an ongoing family issue) the garden decided that summer is essentially here. I got back home to find that the squash plants have begun to make squash!

It seems insanely early to me, but the biggest of the six plants all have female flowers opening. There haven’t been any male flowers open to pollinate the females, so we had several small, un-pollinated zucchinis last night in our sauteed veggies, but some male flowers should be opening soon. When that happens, the zucchinis will be pollinated and grow, rather than just stay small.

For those who aren’t sure how to tell the male flowers from the female flowers: The easiest way to tell the difference is that female flowers all sit on top of tiny squashes, and the male flowers are on non-fruiting stems. In the photo above, there are a couple of male flowers on long, slender stems in front, and the large yellow blossom in back, whose stem looks like a tiny zucchini, is a female.

The progress of the bush beans is less of a surprise. When my planting is on track, I tend to start bringing green beans to the kitchen in May. This picture shows a couple of pretty bean flowers and one of the tiny, just beginning, green beans. This year’s first patch of green beans is in the shadiest part of the garden, but beans do better with less sunlight than many of the summer veggies, so I am expecting to eat a lot of beans from this ~3.5X5 foot patch.

It will be awhile before we have mature peppers, but the flowering has begun. I have always liked the color of the flowers on this particular jalepeno.

One side of the garden has a big, unruly patch of perennial flowers in it. This is the part nearest the utility pole. I have kept the food plants about ten feet away from the pole to avoid any possible contamination of our veggies. It was great to arrive back home to find enormous heads of lilies in bloom. I am not sure how the stalk is holding up all the weight of these flowers and buds!

The rain gauge was showing that we’d had nearly three inches of rain while I was away, and it is raining again today. Luckily, I got some yard work done yesterday in advance of the rain. It is going to be mucky for at least a couple of days after this weather system passes!