Behold The Hyacinth Bean

Back in early May of this year, I posted about the Hyacinth Bean.  You can click on that hyperlink, if you wish, and read about how we got this interesting, beautiful, and deadly (Gasp!) plant in a seed swap.  We grew the seeds and they grew, slowly at first, but then they spread out, competing with the vines of the luffa gourd to cover the 'tunnel' trellis we created with a fence we bent over.

This would have been a beautiful tunnel, but the goats had other ideas than an aesthetic addition to the garden and promptly stretched their long necks with their feet on the fence and ate the hyacinth bean vines that got close to them.  So a half tunnel trellis it will be.  Thank you, goats.

The purple stems of the hyacinth bean and the purple veins in the leaves make this plant a knockout in the garden.  But the flowers of this plant are stunning, and I'm not a flower guy.

Ain't that something?!  The honeybees buzz around them doing their thing.  I should have some seeds of this beautiful plant to share, just as they were shared with me.  If you are interested, just let me know and I'll send you some.  

But that's not the only pretty thing about this plant.  Once the flowers are done, they put on pods.  Pretty purple pods that contain beans.  The beans are edible, I've read, until they are dried, with a few caveats.  According to THIS POST:

Important Note: Uncooked seeds are poisonous as they contain high concentrations of cyanogenic glucosides. They can cause breathing problems, vomiting problems, and convulsions. They need to be boiled for a long time, changing the water twice, to make them edible. Better to leave the cooking to someone experienced with them and save your seed for planting.

That information makes me pause a little before trying to eat them, but I am curious about how they taste.  If they are that pretty, they must taste good, right?  Sometimes, you gotta take a measured risk.  I think about the guy or gal that ate the first raw oyster.  Or boiled the first crawfish?  What culinary delights we would have missed out on if we allowed fear to guide our decisions?

The jury's still out on if we'll try to eat them.  I'll let you know when/if we do.  Until then, it's a crazy world out there, ya'll HOLD ON!  These two hyacinth beans being entwined by the tendrils of a luffa gourd beautifully illustrate that:

That photo also reminds me of a song I used to like in high school by .38 Special whose lyrics went like this:

You see it all around you
Good lovin' gone bad
And usually it's too late when you
Realize what you had

And my mind goes back to a girl I left
Long years ago who told me

Just hold on loosely
But don't let go
If you cling too tightly
You're gonna lose control

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

High Time for Muscadines

Seven years ago my son worked at a nursery in Forest Hill, Louisiana.  He brought home a muscadine vine and we planted it in the side yard.  Muscadines are a grape native to the southeastern United States.  We used a cattle panel wired between two t-posts for a trellis.  Each year we've watched it grow and have picked many muscadines off of it.  It keeps getting bigger and bigger and we've installed extensions to the trellis to accommodate its growth.

They are delicious!  They have a deep flavor that is good even eaten off the vine while warmed by the sun.  They are full of seeds, so you better be ready to spit!  My oldest son solves that problem by eating the seeds.  Can you imagine?

The variety we have is ripe when it is dark.

At the peak of the season, you can pick a couple of quarts of muscadines.  There's always a bird's nest in the middle of the vine.  It is such a nice hiding spot for birds.  Birds certainly have to be careful around our house.  Our cat, Ginger, is a hunter.  She routinely hunts and eats birds, squirrels, rats, mice, moles.  She'll leave their bloodied and half-eaten carcasses on the back door welcome mat to proudly show us what she's done.  This morning there was a young cottontail rabbit that Ginger had killed.  The bad thing is, when Ginger eats her kill, it makes her sick.  She threw up all over the hood of our car while it sat in the garage today!  That was a long explanation to say "birds like to build nests in the middle of the muscadine vine to stay safe from Ginger, the crazy, murderous cat.

Here is a nice shot of a quart of fresh-picked muscadines, plump and beautiful.

Here is a photo of a few days' of the muscadine harvest:

Tomorrow I'll show you something else we do with them besides snack on them.

The Grapes (Muscadines) of Wrath

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Tricia and I, in our late afternoon routine, hands and walk the property line, stopping each day to inhale deeply the fragrant new crisp white magnolia blossoms. If there is a fresher fragrance, I haven't found it.  We'll comment on the fruit on the trees and admire the bright pink blooms of the crepe myrtles.  We'll pass by the pasture and comment on the cows eating grass with their heads down and how nice and carefree it must be to be a MILK cow as opposed to a BEEF cow.

On the west side, we stop by the vineyard.  Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit.  We have a muscadine vine that is loaded down with grapes.  We'll pick about a pint of them each day as the ripen gradually in the summer sun.  The purple ones are the best.

There are plenty green ones right behind the ripe ones, ensuring that we'll enjoy muscadines for days, or maybe weeks, to come.

Each year the vine encompasses a larger portion of the cattle panel upon which they grow. The ground is not particularly rich in this area of the yard, but the muscadine doesn't seem to mind and ekes out its existence on the poor soil, providing us grapes to snack on each summer.  

We pick them each day so that the birds don't get to them first.  Sometimes we eat them right off the vine, their juice warm from the sun and buttery to the taste. They are full of seeds, though, and keep you spitting.  The skins can be a little tart at times, but we still enjoy them.  Everyone needs a muscadine vine.

Each year I keep thinking about making some muscadine jelly, but we always end up eating them all before the jelly-making commences.  Next year we make jelly!