Bean-y Tales

If I can count on anything to do well in my garden it's beans. Good thing I like them! D likes them too, but not as much as I do. This year I expanded my bean horizons with more than the usual plantings of Fresh Pick bush beans. Since space in the garden was at a premium I planted the fence with a number of pole varieties and I thought I'd report on how all the beans are doing.

 In the past I haven't had much production from my pole beans and that includes the much vaunted Fortex, whose bean I like but would've like more of. I've written enough about my Gold Marie Vining  bean which is pictured below. It produces like mad and I hope to be able to keep on growing this variety. Above is my planting of Chinese Red Noodle beans. After getting those first two green noodle beans a few weeks ago, I haven't seen anything...until....this week! Hooray! There are baby red noodle beans.

 At the far end of the fence, past the Gold Maries, past the Red Noodles, is the planting of scarlet runner beans. Planted a bit late for runner beans, they set all of two beans before the hot weather closed down production. Our recent run of unusually cool temps has led to renewed profuse blossoming and yes, some beans. Looks like we'll get to try out a meal of runner beans after all.

 Here are a few close-ups of the baby Scarlet Runner beans. They're quite small at the moment and I'm a bit unsure when to harvest them as they are a new variety to me and nobody I know has ever grown them.

 Below are a couple of pictures of the developing Red Noodle Beans. I'm so excited about them and can't wait to see them develop their color and length. Yes, these look like they'll be red! You can especially see the color in the second photo.

 And below are some noodle bean blossoms. They seem to be rather demure and I miss them before they are already gone and showing beans instead.

On the opposite end of the garden the fence has some beans too. The first is called Aunt Jean's pole bean and it is being grown for dried beans. I've never done this before, so hoping those nice plump beans you see below will dry well. I picked this variety because it is a pole bean and I just don't have the space to devote to the bush varieties.

 Last of the pole beans is good old Kentucky Wonder. It is taking forever to produce and I have taken the photo below of the one and only blossom I've seen so far on those vines. Hope there are more!

 It seems just wrong not to include a picture of my workhorse bush beans. They have been the foundation of my bean harvest for years. I have three plantings of Fresh Pick and the bed pictured is the second one, just about ready to produce. This year I had a scare when Johnny's seeds didn't carry them in their catalogue, but thankfully they still had them to order online. If they don't carry them next year I may have to search out another variety. I've tried Provider in the past and liked them, but not as well as these.

Those are my bean tales for 2013! I'll be sure to post pictures of the noodle beans when they look like noodles!

And The Winner Is.....!

The final poundage count for the onions is in! It destroyed my last record! Oh, alright, I've only been weighing my produce for three years, but what a good year for onions! I posted about them earlier, definitely the star of the 2013 garden. Aren't they gorgeous?? If I do say so myself.

 I plant about the same number of onions every year, starting the seeds in February. Two years ago I got a hefty 40 and 3/4 pounds that saw us comfortably through the year, and we do cook a lot with onions. Last year I got a miserable 13 and 3/4 pounds of mostly small marble sized onions. And you know what a pain in the neck it is to peel multiple little onions when a recipe calls for one large one. But this year! I had them curing outside for a week until the weatherman lied to me and I left them uncovered only to get rained on. So they were trimmed and brought into our very dry basement to complete the process for another week before they were weighed and put in their baskets. The final total: 74 and 1/2 pounds!!! From about the same number of onions, because this year, they grew BIG! Yeah, baby!

 The basket in the forefront is full of Ailsa Craigs. They will be used first, since they usually only store well for about 2 months. They are huge, the two largest weigh 3/4 pound each. The rear baskets contain a variety of storage onions: Redwing, Prince (a favorite), Pontiac and Varsity with a couple of Copra thrown in for good measure. I weighed the shallots too: there are four pounds of nice large ones.

Told my husband to freely use all the onion he wants when he's whipping up a dish. I know I will! Chopping the onions just got a whole lot easier!

Harvest Monday

Here it is Monday again and time to join in the weekly garden show-and-tell hosted at Daphne's Dandelions where gardeners everywhere are sharing what they harvested this past week.

 With all our partial shade here, I do better with greens than many other veggies. Kale is still producing nicely. This batch went into a large kettle of kale and bean soup, made on an unusually damp and chilly day last week, a day that felt more like late September than early August.

 I have finally managed to grow some reasonably heat tolerant lettuce so we are still having salads, with home-grown tomatoes even! The heat tolerant varieties I'm using are Nevada, Pablo, Anuenue, Jericho and Concept. I think I am happiest with the Pablo, but they are all staying relatively sweet (certainly not like the early spring lettuce, but enough to enjoy) and only just beginning to bolt.
And look! A couple of little carrots! Maybe I will get a carrot harvest after all if I can only be a little patient. The broccoli keeps giving many side shoots and I also harvested my remaining early cabbage, which are being turned (I hope) into sauerkraut.

 The picture above and the picture below show the gist of what I've been bringing in this week. The tomatoes are still ripening maddeningly slowly while the plant disease is moving maddeningly fast. Cucumbers are coming in at a good pace and this year we have refrigerator dills again. Yay! And though the photo is a bit unclear, at the top of the basket there are two zucchini! They are from the second planting of zucchini after the failure of the first. Not a lot, but still...

 The yellow Gold Marie Vining beans keep coming in like gangbusters. Pounds of them! This variety is definitely a keeper for me and since my bush green beans have been a bit sluggish this year, they are keeping us in beany goodness. The two light colored trombocino squash are not done justice in the photo. Each one is almost two feet long and they each weigh close to 2 pounds apiece. And there is the first eggplant of what will probably be a very small quantity this year.

Lastly I present a small bunch of basil and a few scallions! The scallions were a part of my interplanting experiment. They'd been planted between early cabbage and I expected the scallions to be ready before the cabbage got large, but it went the opposite way around! The cabbage were all harvested and then the scallions began to get larger.  Still, I'm glad of that outcome because I have some nice scallions to use now for salads and recipes. That's my week here in eastern Connecticut where the weather is getting more like typical August now! Check out all the other great harvests at Daphne's Dandelions!

Trombocino, Trombocino How I love You Trombocino!

Having had a phenomenal summer squash failure in the early summer, it is no wonder I am singing praises to my new favorite squash, the trombocino. No, I haven't gotten tons of them...yet. So far I've harvested two that got very large, yet when they are big they are still tender and not overripe, unlike typical bush zucchinis. But here are the newest:

 These two long fellas should be ready for harvest in two or three days. And hiding there behind that large leaf is another up and comer! To say I'm excited would not be putting a spin on things. There are also several baby ones that I hope will develop. The downside of trombocino is that the vines are huge, so you really need a place for them to sprawl. The upside is that they are really quite resistant to all the nasties that like to attack squash.

 All is not lost on the zucchini front either. My original 8 (yes, 8!) zucchini plants put out all of 3 small harvestable zukes. All the other babies rotted on the vine and then the plants got sick and died. Can anybody have any worse luck with summer squash? In addition I had two yellow squash plants that gave me 2 small squashes before they died. No glut at this place!

My second planting is starting to produce now. The small zuke you see above will be harvested today. It's the only one so far on the four plants I started from direct seeding in late June. The plants don't look super hale and hearty. In addition, I planted one yellow squash plant (the variety I use is called Saffron) and it is very healthy. So far it has surpassed my two earlier plants, having given us three squash. Lest I should get too cocky two days ago a strong gust of wind knocked this healthy plant over and partially split open its stem, but so far it seems to be surviving, although it would be just my luck if it didn't.
But no matter, I have trombocinos coming in so there will be summer squash goodness after all without the burden of having to figure out what to do with a superabundance. Superabundance?? That is the stuff of dreams, lol!

Harvest Monday

It's Harvest Monday again over at Daphne's Dandelions, a great place to go and check out how gardens are doing all over the country and the world!
Although I still don't feel as though I am really bringing in much from the summer garden, I do have some steady harvests, mostly from the beans, good old dependable beans! Good thing I like them as much as I do!

 My photos are not the best! I really need to learn a thing or two about digital photography. Above are the two types of bean currently coming in: Gold Marie Vining, a flat yellow pole bean and my usual bush bean, Fresh Pick. I am really pleased with the Gold Marie's. The vines are extremely prolific and the pods are huge. Some are as much as eight inches long while still remaining flat and they taste good. I'm still picking nice amounts of broccoli shoots and that yellow squash you see is the first from my second planting of summer squash! Very exciting considering the terrible showing of my first planting. I also planted Chinese Red Noodle beans. I have not seen so much as a blossom on them. So imagine my surprise, when I went to pull a strange looking weed and found instead that they were this:

 Yup. Two GREEN noodle beans. Just two. And not red, like they're supposed to be. But there still have been no blossoms or signs of any other beans, red or otherwise. These two tasted good nevertheless and I hope to see some more before the summer is out.

 Slower than molasses in January the tomatoes are ripening. I have disease ramping up quickly in the plants. Every day I feel like a surgeon with a diabetic patient, lopping off diseased limbs (or in this case, leaves and branches) in the hopes of prolonging life, at least until the green tomatoes ripen up. I'd give a lot to find a dependable way to prevent tomato diseases in my garden.

 Here are most of my Lutz Greenleaf beets, which I harvested this week. I left a few smaller ones in the garden to grow a bit more. While there are two more beet beds, they don't look wonderful and odds are these are about the last beets I'll harvest. At least they were big and tasty! And I do mean big:

 I also picked the last of my Kossacks. I planted out a new batch for fall, hoping to get a few more before the frost hits in October. We'll see.

 And we're still getting some lettuce from my small patch of heat-tolerant lettuce. I think this is the latest in summer I've ever had lettuce still going. I need to start some for fall very soon!

 Later in the week there were more green beans, more yellow beans, broccoli shoots, little tomatoes and a second yellow squash from the new plant. Already a better squash harvest than I had from my early plants!

And, finally: the cucumber harvest has begun to kick in. Two years ago I was swimming in cukes. Last year there were hardly any. This year may be right in the middle. The Lemons are scant, but the Double Yields are starting to produce nicely and I do have a second planting that is just beginning to blossom. 

Our August weather has been remarkably temperate so far. Eighties and dry as compared to July's intense heat and humidity. It actually feels more like September and when I went out to walk this morning at 6am, it was only 54F! Certainly makes for easier working in the garden. Happy August harvesting!

An Interesting Experiment

In the spring when I plant my garden I find that I quickly run out of space for all the different vegetables I want to grow for the year, even though by many standards I have a pretty large garden. So this year when I realized I would have no room for my parsnips I decided to try interplanting them between a faster growing crop. I chose to plant between my early cauliflowers and the red cabbages.
Well, interplanting the caulis worked pretty well because they grew quickly and were out of there quickly. Here is what the parsnip patch looks like where the cauliflowers were:

 They are healthy, large and thriving plants! And here is where the red cabbage were:

Of course, the cabbage were just pulled last week. The spindly parsnip plants had been blocked from the sun by the large cabbage leaves so they are a bit anemic. That is what the parsnips looked like on the cauliflower side a month ago when the caulis were pulled, so I have hopes that in a few weeks time the parsnips on the cabbage side will pick up. Time will tell. And ultimately, the result of the experiment will depend on whether I have nice large parsnip roots. I've never grown successful parsnips, so I had nothing to lose by trying this. If it works, I'll do it again, but not with slow-growing red cabbage. I'll stick to early cauliflowers or lettuce. I'll let you know in a few months how the experiment turned out!

Harvest Monday: Allium Triumph Edition

 Beware! Lots of pictures in this week's Harvest Monday because I really didn't take time to group things together and, well, I really wanted to show off my alliums. But, first things first: Harvest Monday is graciously hosted by Daphne's Dandelions where each week gardeners from around the world share what they've harvested and to my mind many words of wisdom about the art of vegetable gardening. Go visit, it's very motivational!
They're here!! At last, my first ripe tomatoes. A full ten days later than last year, but finally we are able to taste the best of the summer garden, a fresh home-grown tomato. Sure hope there are a lot more of these soon!

 My overflowing basket of kale was also one of the bright spots of the week. I had a fabulous spring garden, but my summer garden is not one of the better ones. It seems that none of my heat loving plants are doing that well. Production is slow and limited and disease and pests are rife.

 Even the green beans are nowhere near as productive as I'm used to, but they are coming in at least. I also have begun to harvest my pole yellow beans in small handfuls.

 Broccoli shoots are still coming in steadily.  And below you can see my entire red cabbage harvest. Not one is bigger than a baseball. I have never figured out how to grow a large red cabbage. The white cabbages grow beautifully, but the reds are very reluctant to size up. I will cook these into German sweet and sour red cabbage and freeze for later use.

 The berries are still keeping my spirits up! Blueberries are still coming in strong. I've picked over seventeen pounds so far.

 We also have two patches of wild blackberries. They are a great treat, but unfortunately have settled themselves into very inconvenient spots on our property, attempting to crowd up to my garden and to smother my new little apple tree. They will have to be trimmed into submission after berry season is over.

 After harvesting three saladette tomatoes, my Sungolds decided it was time to ripen too. Hope there will be a lot more than these lonely two soon.

 But now...ta-da-da...I get to crow about the one triumph of my 2013 summer garden, my alliums! The garlic was trimmed and weighed last week and I got 13 pounds of it. By comparison, last year I harvested about four pounds and never did use it up. The garlic in the blue containers is what I'm saving for seed from each of six varieties. In the basket is the garlic we will use and give away.

 I harvested my onions yesterday and I can say without a doubt, they are the biggest and the best onions I have ever grown! Yay, onions! Last summer the vast majority of my onions were no bigger than sets, but this year, oh this year! Below are my Ailsa Craigs, which are not keepers, but will last about two months in storage. They are large and sweet and beautiful.

 I had to take a photo of the two very biggest onions in the lot. They are Ailsa Craig and I will weigh them when they're cured and trimmed.

 Here are the Redwings. The seed came in on backorder so they were started later than the other onions, but they still came out a pretty good size.

 I grew a number of varieties of yellow storage onions, Prince being my favorite. I also have some Copra, Pontiac, and Varsity. When I first planted out my seedlings, they all looked a bit wan and unhappy and I remember really worrying about whether they'd make it. My goodness, did they make it. Wish they'd tell a thing or two to the zukes, cukes, eggplant, peppers and carrots!

 Finally, here are my shallots, all grown from seed. I grew Prisma and Ambition and they also grew huge. When those seedlings were first planted out, about half had already died back in their flats, which made it that much nicer to see how well the survivers did this summer.

 All those alliums are now drying out on top of our old family camper, waiting for a bit of summer sun to help in the process of curing. Sunshine's been a bit scarce lately!

Here's to more good harvest as we close out the month of July! Already?!