Still picking green beans

With Fall almost here, there is not as much to harvest in the garden right now. But if you walk up the path between the chicken coop and the greenhouse, the first bed you come to is the green beans.

This bed gave us lettuce in early spring and then early potatoes in summer. The third planting was green beans, and now they are ready!

My wife and I picked a heaping bowl full of them. She also picked some late tomatoes. I only found one ripe tomato from my topsy turvy. When I carried it in with the beans, it looked like a green bean sundae!

With this heaping bowl of beans, we froze 5 quarts and made 5 pints of Dilly Beans. We have never tried pickled green beans before, so we only made a small batch.

If we like them enough, we will make a lot more next summer.

Since green beans are probably the easiest thing to grow in the garden, I don't know why I don't plant more. Next year!

Comments

[molly]

Growing and preserving are always fun things to do. Knowing we are putting food away for another day is something that has always appealed to me.

[Desiree]

With the fall harvest here, we're already thinking about what we want to do next year and green beans was one of them. So they are really easy? And this may sound foolish, but being a "bean" I figured they would need something to climb on, but your photo does not show that. Is this a correct assumption?

[Marc]

The beans in that bed are bush beans, which only grow about a foot tall. The beans you are thinking of are pole beans which grow very tall. We grew those earlier in the season on the trellis visible in the background behind my wife in the above picture. Both kinds of green beans grow pretty easily. The Bush beans don't take quite as long from seed to harvest and I grow them about 6 inches apart in all directions. Pole beans are great too. They do require some kind of support but they will give you more beans per plant and its great picking without bending over. If you are tight on space, I would go with a simple trellis and pole beans. Let me know what you decide!

[Desiree]

Great! Thanks for the info Marc, I'll be sure to let you know next year what we come up with. :)