Mission Accomplished

Right outside the garden gate, I caught a little creature.  A bug.  A ladybug, to be precise.  It could have been a gentlemanbug, perhaps, as I'm not sure how to tell them apart.  The bug was quickly trying to get away, but I wanted her (or him) back in the garden.  Ladybugs are beneficial insects.  I need all of them that we can handle as the stinkbugs absolutely tear up my tomatoes and right now, I'm having a heck of a time with caterpillars on our beets.

Let's get to the heart of tonight's post, Mission Accomplished.  That phrase is often used when a goal is achieved.  George W. Bush infamously put a banner up, if I recall correctly, that had that phrase on it, and I don't think at that point that the mission was accomplished.  Sometimes the goal is reached; however, and this is one of those times.  What am I speaking of?

Each year as the summer heat beats down, I long for cooler temperatures and a respite from the high heat and humidity.  It is in those dog days of summer that I plant a row or two of green beans.  Snap beans, you might call them.  The goal is this: We want to have mature fresh green beans to harvest and eat as a side dish for Thanksgiving Day.  To this end, I planted two rows of Contender Green Beans that I had saved from seed from the spring crop.  They germinated and grew and here is a photo of them the day before Thanksgiving:

The plants, other than some leaves that insects ate on, look good.  But we need to look beneath the canopy to see if we reached our goal.  Drum roll, please.  Well, how about that?  I see mature green beans, ready to harvest.  I also see some that need another week of growing time, and then I see blooms that promise more beans after that!  Looks like a healthy crop of Thanksgiving green beans.

I picked a bucket full of the ripened ones.  Some were a little over ripe, but we'll eat them.  After Tricia washed them, I snapped off the ends of the beans and stringed them.

It's always a good idea to string them, especially as they are a little larger or the strings are a tough when you're feasting on them.  One thing is for sure, fresh green beans are a real treat.  Tricia sort of stir fried these in butter and added dried cranberries and chopped pecans for a nice, festive, tasty side dish.

Mission Accomplished on this year's crop of fall green beans.  We had a mighty fine mess of them and believe it or not, we just finished up on the leftovers tonight.  The best part is, these Contender green beans will continue producing for us until the frost kills the plant.  We may actually be able to freeze or can some to set aside for the winter months.

You Can’t Eat the Whole Bucket of Beans in One Sitting

A long time ago when I was a young boy, if I put too much on my plate but couldn’t finish it all, my parents or grandparents would turn to me and say, “Your eyes were too big for your stomach, huh?” When the green bean harvest is coming in strong, there’s no way to eat them as fast as you pick ‘em.  And you don’t want to do that anyway.  If you do it right, you can enjoy the best of both worlds – you can enjoy ‘just-picked’ green beans right out of the garden AND you can do like a squirrel and sock some away for later months when it is either too hot or too cold to grow them.

But you want to store them right.  Mushy dark green beans aren’t very appetizing.  We blanch our beans and then when we pull them out of the freezer, it is really hard to tell by color, taste, or texture that they are not fresh.  Here’s how we do it:

First we wash them and snap off both ends of the bean.  We don’t snap them into smaller segments.  We leave them whole, but that’s just our preference.

Let's Blanch Some Green Beans...

While I’m washing and snapping, I get a big pot of water boiling.  Once it reaches a rolling boil, I drop in the first batch of beans.  I try to guesstimate about the amount that will fit in a quart-sized freezer bag.  The water will stop boiling and I continue to watch it closely.  As soon as it reaches a boil again, I set the kitchen timer for three (3) minutes.

Set the timer for 3 minutes

During that three minute period, I wash the sink down, fill it halfway with cold water and add ice.  When the alarm goes off, telling me that the beans have boiled for three minutes, I QUICKLY pull them out of the water and dunk them in the icy-cold water.  The point of the exercise is to immediately halt the cooking process.

Cool them down quickly!

Then, of course I start another batch blanching.  Blanching inactivates the enzymes that are present in vegetables that mature the vegetable or fruit.  Blanching will allow you to freeze the green beans while maintaining their color, texture, and flavor.  The color of the beans are just beautiful.

Beautifully colored

I drain them and them pack them tightly into quart-sized freezer bags, label them with crop and date and then arrange them in the freezer.  In January when the sky is grey and temperatures are frigid, we can walk to the deep-freeze and pull out a bag of ‘fresh-picked’ green beans to enjoy. 

4 quarts of fresh green beans ready for the deep freeze

One gallon frozen and (hopefully) many more to go.  I’m thinking about pickling some green beans and also canning a few as well.

Pickin’ a Mess of Green Beans – April 2016

The month of April was as perfect as perfect can be for growing green beans.  Perfect temperatures.  Perfect rainfall.  Just perfect.  The first variety I planted was our old standby – Contender Green Beans.  We’ve found these to be solid producers, consistent, tender, and best of all – good eatin’!  I planted them (two seeds wide – 6 inches apart) back on February 20^th on a row 18” wide and 24’ long.  The young leaves are Kelly green, while the older leaves are almost blue, letting you know that they are enjoying the composted chicken manure that was amended into the garden soil prior to planting.  At the flowering stage, I top-dressed with a sprinkling of the same.

Healthy Contender Green Beans

To crowd out weeds, I mulched the young plants with a thick layer of chopped up live oak leaves and grass from the first mowing of the year.  This will rot over the course of the growing season and become organic matter.  It is also what I call my “earthworm magnet,” as the decomposing leaves attracts earthworms almost faster than a plate of rice & gravy does to Cajuns.   I grabbed a colander and bent over at the beginning of the row at the first plant.  There are green beans of all different stages on the plant.  That’s good news.  I use two hands to pull each bean so as to not damage the plant.  If you are in a rush and use only one hand, you run the risk of breaking off more than just the bean, but the entire fruiting stalk of the plant that contains other (unripe) beans.

Different Stages of Development

To show the full cycle, the picture below shows that while we are picking mature beans, there are plenty of immature beans as well as blooms.  This lets you know that there is a nice, steady stream of green bean inventory that will need to be checked and harvested every 2-3 days or so.  I like them to be young and tender, before the beans inside the pod have swollen.  Actually the one in the picture above was a little too big for my liking, but sometimes they are hiding in the foliage and you miss them the first time you pick.  No worries – they’re still good.

Blooms and pods

I filled up a nice bucket of beans on this day.  They were clean and bug free with little to no damage.  Sometimes the beans will be discolored or diseased from touching the ground, but these were all perfect.  The chickens clucking just across the fence are generally the recipients of any damaged beans.  They’ll eat anything that we won’t.

Bucket 'o Beans

I took the bucket of beans into the kitchen, washed them up and snapped off the ends of the beans.  People called these beans “string beans” because in the past, you’d snap off the ends and remove a long string from the pod.  The string was inedible.  Contender green beans don’t have this string, so you don’t have to worry about the step of ‘stringing’ them.  They are ready to eat.

Mountain 'o Beans

Speaking of ready to eat.  I’m ready to eat a nice ‘mess’ of beans – the first beans of the season.  I dug a few potatoes from the garden and we cooked the baby potatoes along with the green beans with a generous amount of butter.

A nice Mess of Beans (and baby potatoes)!

A mess of fresh picked green beans.  It don’t get much better than this!  Tomorrow we’ll show you another thing we do with them. 

Pickin' Green Beans in the Fall

October is generally one of the driest months we have.  It's kind of odd, because October is usually a month of stellar weather, when clear skies, cooler temperatures, nice breezes, and finally, relief from the long, hot summer brings enjoyment.  The problem is that the dry spell coincides with the planting of the Fall Garden, and those seeds and young plants need water to grow.  This means that I spend a lot of time in the late afternoon until dark-thirty watering plants.  For the last couple of weeks, the bok choy is laid out on the ground looking exhausted.  It is only after a good soaking from the water hose that the bok choy perks up.

There are other plants growing that are producing right now.  Green beans, for instance.  Nourishing rains would have equated to greater yields, but I mulched real good around the plants to retain soil moisture and we're happy for the beans we get.

A few nice beans on each plant

I like to pick the green beans when they are young and tender.  Fresh green beans are so good to eat. There's really no comparison of fresh green beans to the canned ones.  Although canned green beans can be great with new potatoes and bacon, it is not a similar product as fresh picked green beans, lightly cooked so that they are still a little crunchy and have that brilliant green color.

While bending over straddling the rows, I carefully picked each green bean that was sized right and left a bunch to continue growing for a few days.  There were beans in all stages of development, from the ones I picked to eat for supper, all the way to the blooms you see below.  That is good news and means that we'll have staggered crops to enjoy with our meals until the first frost knocks the beans back.

More green beans coming soon

I picked a nice bucket of beans, the first of many, I hope, and brought them inside and gave them a good rinse and then put them in the crisper in the refrigerator.

First bucket of Fall crop green beans

The next day Tricia cooked them in a skillet, basically stir-fried them, and they were delicious!  Rain is finally in the long range forecast for this weekend.  I'm thinking that a good soaking rain would refresh everything in the garden and get things growing again and that means more green beans to enjoy as a great accompaniment to our meals.