GardenDesk

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!

Olympic Sized Pink Tomatoes and Purple Beans!

Matron at Down on the Allotment posted a very creative fruit and vegetable olympic rings logo, and asked which veggies in your garden are worthy of the olympics. She asked which ones are FASTER, HIGHER or STRONGER than any others? Well I'd like to add BIGGER to that list and nominate my Glick's Brandywine tomatoes and my Chinese Red Noodle Beans.

My brandywines are more than a pound each!

 

This one weighed in at 1.8 pounds - a monster!

 

They are not supposed to weigh that much so I don't know what happened. They sure are big and delicious!

Even crazier than that are these Chinese Red Noodle Beans:

 

These beans are two feet long!

 

Look at them growing on the trellis compared to the Kentucky Wonder Beans next to them.

 

I measured them and they really are 24 inch pods!

 

It was hard to measure them accurately because our kitten Maggie kept playing with them and pulling the beans away.

 

I'm not really sure how to eat these Chinese Red Noodle beans. I'm going to try some smaller 18 inch pods in stir fry or simply sauteed. The only problem is that Maggie may eat them all before I can cook them. :)

 

 

Glick's Brandywine and Chinese Red Noodle Beans; Veggies of Olympic proportions!

Great post idea, Matron.