More is More

I have to admit when it comes to gardening I am quite greedy. More is definitely the way to go. I suppose I have a famine mentality so I need to plant a lot of everything and many different varieties to try and make sure we have enough.
Take my beans for example. I have had very little success growing beans here and they are one of favourite things to eat, as well as being a good staple for drying. This year I was determined to get a crop. After preparing the soil I chose many different varieties to see what would do well. Guess What? of course they have all done well, we already have so many beans and they are just starting. All visitors will be going away with bags of beans, we will freeze some, eat lots and make lots of our favourite olive oil beans, i think i will freeze batches of that too.
I planted purple king, rattlesnake and blue lake climbers. They are over two metres tall and cropping prodigiously, the rattlesnake are a particularly attractive bean with their purple stripes. I was really disappointed with the germination rate of the blue Lakes, I think only two grew, perhaps that is just as well as two vines have covered about two square metres of mesh, they have just started flowering so I think there will be plenty of them.
I also planted six varieties of bush beans, Frost, Dragons tongue, stringless pioneer, Borlotti, violet queen and another one that I cant remember ( I need to get better plant markers, I've been using paddle pop sticks but keep losing them ). I picked the first bush beans yesterday and they are also loaded. Maybe next year I will be more moderate.    


Comments

Linda Woodrow said…
Hi Anne, my favourite way to preserve beans is just to let them fully mature on the vine, shell them , put them on the verandah on an old screen door to dry, and store them in glass jars. They're one of my real staples, and like you I have a bit of a famine mentality about them! Pakoras, frijoles, ful medames - there's any number of great bean recipes, full of proteins and complex carbs. You can't have too many!
January 17, 2011 at 3:21 PM
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