What Happens When You Rush Things

Gardening is an inexact science.  You win some and you lose some, and you definitely learn along the way.  For planting the spring garden, I use the average last frost date for our zip code.  Our average last frost date is March 22nd.  If you plant on March 22nd, you have only a 10% chance of getting a frost and injuring or killing your plants.  You can also use the Early last frost date.  That date is March 3rd.  If you plant on that date, you have a 30% chance of injuring/killing your plants.

Sometimes, I subscribe to the "you gotta risk it to get the biscuit" mentality.  I could gamble and plant early, right?  What could happen, really?  So, I pushed things this year, planting the snap beans, cucumbers, squash and cucumbers around March 10th.  Well...  Just so happens, it got down to 34 degrees.  I thought, incorrectly, that things would be okay.  We have lots of trees, the plants were mulched, they would make it.  I was busy doing other things and I didn't even go out and cover them.

All the plants were damaged!  Let's take a look.  Here are the snap beans.  The leaves are burned from the frost.  Fortunately, fresh new growth is being put on.  They'll be stunted, but most of the beans are going to make it.

But look at the cucumbers!  I have 3 varieties planted on a cattle panel trellis.  The cucumbers are hit a lot harder than the snap beans.  Honestly, I think I'll have to replant ALL of these except one on the very end.  I don't know how it avoided the damage.  I will wait for 3 more days to see if any new growth appears.  Then if nothing happens, I'll pull the trigger and replant.

This third photo shows the severely damaged squash, including hills of zucchini, straightneck yellow squash and crookneck yellow squash.  This right here was my main reason for rushing things.  I figured if I got a really early start, I could avoid the squash vine borers.  This pest usually kills all of my squash.  I theorized that by getting a jump on things, I could make a big harvest of squash before the onslaught of the SVBs.  The squash was absolutely beautiful, with big, healthy green leaves.  They would have been blooming in a week.  Then the temperatures dropped and all of the big leaves turned brown and died.

But I'm hopeful.  I see fresh new green growth.  There's an old adage that says, "That which does not kill you, makes you stronger."  If there's any truth to that, perhaps we'll have a strong squash crop.  We'll wait and see.

Finally, in the garden in the side yard, here are my butternut squash and spaghetti squash.  Burned by the frost? Sure.  But these plants will live to fight another day!

There are significant benefits to getting things planted early.  You get plants that produce prior to fighting the high heat and bug and pest pressure.  But there is significant downside risk that may cause you to have to replant everything.  Fortunately, I don't think that is possible.  However, I'm pretty sure I'll be replanting all the cucumbers.  I will try to rush things and plant early again, I'm quite sure, but next time, I'll cover all of the plants.

Putting Vegetables Up

Ah!  Gardening is so relaxing.  Why, look at this pastoral scene.  I'm sitting on a concrete bench in the shade in an area we call the grove, and I'm looking at the garden growing.  The sweet potatoes are vining, the cucumbers are blooming and producing.  The yellow squash and zucchini are yielding such that we can barely keep up.  Same with the snap beans.  The corn is tasseling in the background.

There are times that gardening is relaxing.  It is rewarding, to be sure.  But once you plant it and harvest it, the work is not done.  In fact, you've got to eat it, give it away, or preserve it, because you'll flat run out of room.  You can't sit around once it's harvested.  There's work to be done.

We're on the third picking of the snap beans, and I picked a fourth time today.  We plant Contender green beans and Purple TeePee beans (just to keep things interesting).  We washed them up and chilled them and while they were still fresh, snapped off the ends.

Green beans are one of those things that are just favorites of everyone.  Even if you aren't a vegetable person (we all are), if you have someone a little finicky, well, they'll eat green beans, especially if you cook them with some tasso or bacon or sausage to amp up the flavor.  We did cook some for the Mother's Day meal, but the rest of this portion of the harvest, we'll freeze.

To freeze them, you'll want to blanch them.  This stops the enzyme action from breaking them down.  It also keeps a great texture and vibrant color.  Except for the purple beans.  they turn dark green upon blanching.  We blanch for 3 minutes.

We immediately ladle the blanched beans into the kitchen sink, which is full of ice water & ice.  This stops the cooking process.

Once completely cool, we drain through a colander.

And then we bag them all up in quart-sized zip loc freezer bags.  This is the perfect size to pull out of the freezer and voila, you have a side dish that only needs to be warmed up.  Best part of it is, it is healthy, fresh, and delicious.

The second picking yielded ten quarts of beans.  

Still No Freeze

As of December 29th, we've had maybe three mornings that I've walked out and seen a very light frost out on the pasture.  It has not significantly damaged anything in the garden, though.  The snap beans had a very slight 'bronzing' of the leaves as evidence of the frost, but that's it.  I always plant a fall crop of snap beans with the goal of growing a mess of fresh snap beans for Thanksgiving dinner.  We accomplished that this year, but additionally, they've kept producing.  I've harvested another two big baskets of green beans since Thanksgiving.  We had some for lunch after church this morning.

This is the longest that I've been able to keep them producing.  Usually a freeze has burnt them to the ground by now, but they are loaded up for another picking!

Not only that, but they're still blooming!  We'll see how long we can keep this going.  

We have been harvesting lettuce, kale, chard, and broccoli already, but yesterday I picked a big, fat cauliflower!  It was possibly the biggest head of cauliflower we've ever grown.

I don't know how to show you proper perspective other than tell you that it's bigger than my head.  I put my left hand by it for comparison.

We'll be cutting this one up and putting it on a baking tray and drizzling with olive oil and lots of minced garlic before roasting in the oven.  That's my favorite way to eat cauliflower.

In other garden news, I'm expecting delivery of all my onion starts next week.  On December 31st, I always plant all of our tomatoes, peppers and eggplant from seed.  Lots of exciting gardening tasks coming up soon.

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.

Feeding the Fishes

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  I love the family time, the festivities, the crisp fall weather in the air, the focus on thankfulness and the food.  One of the things that we always shoot for is fresh green beans out of the garden as a side dish on the menu.  We grow snap beans in the spring.  In the fall, it's a little more tricky, but it's worth it.  I'm thinking about fresh snap beans wrapped in little bundles bound by bacon, topped with brown sugar and cooked in the oven.  Delicious!

But we have to work hard to get them there.  For one thing we planted two rows of Contender Snap Beans.  It's still 90 degrees a week into October.  That means the pests like army worms, caterpillars and other bugs are feasting on all the fresh foliage.  You can see some evidence of worm damage to the sweet potato leaves in the right corner of the photo below.  In looking at the forecast, on Tuesday, we'll have lows in the lower 60's and highs around 84 degrees.  That'll be the best the weather has been in a while.  Hopefully it will send the pests into hibernation or at least slow them down.

Yesterday, now that the snap beans are getting some size, I figured it was high time to give them some fertilizer.  They were started with some composted chicken manure, but now it's time to give them a little boost.  This time I'll hit them with some fish emulsion.   I use a powdered fish emulsion that calls for 1 Tablespoon per gallon of water that I put in my garden sprayer.  The leaves are covered until they are wet, giving them a good foliar feeding and then a spray the ground around the stem until the soil is wet.

I learned from experience to try to use it all up, leaving no leftovers.  If the fish emulsion is left in the sprayer, it heats up and 'cooks.'  The concoction turns green and smells absolutely awful - like raw sewerage.  So now I use it all up, emptying out the sprayer.  Although the fish emulsion stinks, the plants love it, and it is an organic, natural way to fertilize your plants.  I'll try to do this once every week.

Hopefully, this will keep the snap beans growing and pretty soon we'll see blooms and then a little later, pods.  And you know what that means?  We'll be swimming in snap beans come Thanksgiving.

The Snap Bean Goal

We always have a goal to have fresh snap beans for Thanksgiving Dinner.  Some years we get an early freeze and the beans don't make it.  Some other years we've had worms and/or rabbits decimate the plants before they even bloom.  This year, in spite of the drought, we got the beans in the ground at the right time.  The seed we used was saved seed from the spring crop.

Well, we met our goal.  On Thanksgiving morning, I was bending over in the garden harvesting snap beans.  They were quite nice.  I filled up my basket with three different varieties.

From the left side to the right in the basket, we have Italian Roma II, Blue Lake Bush/Contenders, and Purple TeePee Beans.

From a taste standpoint, the star of the show is the Italian Roma.  These beans are wide and flat.  To me they have a delicious taste.

To ensure we were going to meet our goal of having them for Thanksgiving Dinner, I snapped off the ends of the beans and washed them up.  Tricia cooked them and we ate them up.  Mission Accomplished.

We like to grow things that are colorful.  The purple teepee beans add a colorful touch to the garden.  Oddly, when they are cooked, they lose the purple color.  Regardless the color, they are all scrumptious.  Tricia cooked them, adding some cashews and cranberries.  They were a hit.  What we couldn't eat fresh, we blanched and froze.  We've already picked another mess of snap beans and will be eating them again shortly.

A Successful Experiment

I remember reading about 10 years ago how Monsanto was suing small farmers to protect its patents on genetically modified seed.  No seed saving allowed.  That was their property.  I'm not big on genetic modification.  Call me old school.  That's one of the reasons why we plant open pollinated, non-hybrid heirloom seeds.  Each year we're able to save our own seeds.  Some seeds require different processes or techniques for saving the seed.  

Over the years we've saved many different seeds and had great success.  Off-hand, we've saved the following seeds: carrots, lettuce, cowpeas, squash, tomatoes, kale, spinach, dill, parsley, peppers, okra, etc.  Funny thing is, we've never saved the simplest one.  The seed we all learned to grow in Kindergarten by planting these in some dirt in a Dixie cup.  Yep, green beans!  This year we aimed to do that.  We showed in an earlier post how we saved three varieties of snap beans: Contender, Italian Roma and Purple Teepee beans.

In the midst of the drought, we aimed to test germination of the saved seed.  Let's see what happened.  

Well, you know if you are seeing blooms, it's all good.  The purple bloom above is from the purple teepee beans.  The bloom below is from the Contender beans, or it could be the Italian Roma beans now that I think of it.  You can see the tiny bean pods developing.

Nearly every bean germinated, so I would say the experiment was a success.

We're already harvesting a few.  In the basket below, the Purple Teepee beans are at the top (of course!), the Contenders are to the right and the Italian Romas (my favorites) are to the left.

Our goal each year is to have fresh picked green beans for Thanksgiving Dinner.  Looks like this year we've achieved our goal.  With our experiment being a success, I now know that I have enough seed saved so that I don't need to purchase green bean seeds for this spring.  The only hard part in saving seed is having the discipline to save your seed and not eat it all!

Running Out of Time

The rains have been few and far between this summer.  Shrubs and trees have died in the yard.  It has been an unusual time, to say the least.  We started four different varieties of pumpkins back on July 4th.  After watering them every day for a month and a half, the pumpkins at first gave a valiant effort.  One by one they wilted, drooped, waved a white flag and slumped into the mulch.

The fall garden deadlines to get the seeds planted are quickly arriving.  Broccoli, Cabbage, and Cauliflower had to be planted by September 1.  I think I was five days late.  Here we are.  As soon as they have their first true leaves, I'll transplant into bigger pots and water with some diluted fish emulsion to get them jump started.

Next, I focused on snap beans.  We just love snap beans.  They must be planted by September 10th.  We usually try plant so that we pick the first fresh snap beans on Thanksgiving morning.  We pick them whole and arrange them in bundles, wrapping them in bacon, putting a pat of butter on top and then topping with some brown sugar.  Bake them in the oven and you've got a beautiful and delicious side dish fresh from the garden.  (Of course you wrap most anything with bacon and it would be good.)

The problem is, the snap beans have to be direct seeded into the rows.  With no rain, and us being with Benjamin in the hospital.  That's risky.  Would the snap beans suffer the same fate as the pumpkins.  Well, we've been praying for rain.  I was thinking about holding off planting UNTIL we got rain, but what kind of faith is that?  We prayed for rain and I planted.  Looking back, I should have planted with an umbrella in my hand.  We were running out of time, but we got two rows of snap beans planted.

After planting, I watered them in with a hose.  I did the same the next day, too.  And the next.  And the next after that.

Pretty soon...  You see the little sprout pushing the soil upward.  Once I had sprouts, I'd water in the morning AND the evening.  I'm planting into homemade compost.  It is full of organic matter, but it dries out quickly.

The seedling struggles to push the soil out of the way, arching its "back," with its cotyledon visible.

The soft, early morning sun coaxes the first leaves to emerge, bright and green.  The seed coat holds loosely to the leaves before dropping off.  The stem, once hunch-backed, is erect and ready to thrust itself upward.  If we could see beneath the soil, we'd see a developing root system, stretching out in the ground.  I've layered some composted chicken litter a couple inches below.  Once those roots hit that, they'll jump out of the ground and the leaves will turn so green, they'll almost be blue!

The new leaves will soon open and will seek the warm of the sun.  The wonder of photosynthesis will begin to occur and continued growth will happen.

If growing conditions cooperate, the little plants will flourish and will put out blooms that will be visited by our honeybees.  Those blooms will yield fresh snap beans.

And those snap beans will make a great side dish for Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving will be extra special this year.  We have A LOT to be thankful for!  Thank you Lord for your blessings on me and my family!

Snap Beans - Four Ways!

The Spring harvest is on!  Tricia picked up a nifty basket from her mom that is coming in useful.  We filled it with zucchini, yellow crookneck and yellow straightneck squash.

But it's not just the squash coming in.  Our snap bean crop looks to be a bumper crop.  We've never picked this many on the first picking.  Tricia gave me "the look" when I started carrying all this in.  Harvesting is not the end of the work.  While they're fresh, we have to preserve the harvest.

Below you'll see Blue Lake Bush beans, Contender beans, Italian Roma beans and Purple TeePee beans.

We eat a bunch of them fresh.  So good. We like to cook them with new potatoes and butter.  Lately, we've been cooking them with tasso and that adds great smoky, seasoned flavor.

We also snap them and pressure can a number of pints.  The pressure cooker holds 10 quart jars at a time, so we try to do them in 10 pint batches.

With some of the straightest of the Blue Lake Bush beans, we pickled them in a vinegar solution with dill and red pepper flakes and garlic.  Crispy pickled green beans.  Yum!!

Then we blanched and froze six additional quart bags of Contenders.

The water bath canner holds 7 pints, so we have 7 pints of pickled beans.  In the pressure canner, we snapped and canned 10 pints of contenders/blue lake bush beans and 10 pints Italian Roma beans.

Tricia labeled them with dates and they're ready to go in the pantry.

Then for the fourth preservation method, we're trying something we've never done.  We are dehydrating some snap beans.  First we snapped them.

Then we blanched them.  They come out such a bright, healthy color.

Then we line the dehydrator trays (all 7 of them) with beans.  Here's the contenders:

Here are the Italian Romas:

After about 10-12 hours of drying, here's what they look like:

Seven trays made 2 quart jars of dried snap beans.

While we have fresh, we're eating fresh picked beans.  But in the late summer and winter, we'll try putting the dried beans in soups and stews and see how they turn out once they're rehydrated.  I ate a few of them plain.  They had a snap to them like potato chips.  They needed some salt, though!  Always looking for new ways to preserve the harvest.