Yard-long Beans

Today I harvested 4 different kinds of beans in the garden.  Clockwise from the bottom of the basket in the  picture are Kentucky Wonder pole beans, wax bush beans, Romano pole beans, and yard-long beans.  Also called asparagus beans, these asian beans vine like pole beans and produce long, thin, flexible pods that can grow up to 3 feet in length, but are tastiest when picket between 12 and 24 inches long.

The leaves grow in three's, just like normal beans, but they are narrower and a very dark green.  The pods form in pairs from a pale flower that forms on the end of a stem.  The plant is a prolific producer.  I found the seed at the Richmond Southern States on West Broad, and planted them in the same spot where I'd grown all those peas earlier in the season.

The long beans are chewier than regular green beans, and they are fantastic in a stir fry with other veggies.  Since we have a bunch of these in the fridge already, I decided to cook some yard-longs up for lunch today.

I chopped the beans into small pieces, less than an inch long, and boiled them in chicken broth for 5 minutes. In hindsight, this was an unnecessary step that I'll leave out next time.

I peeled and chopped 4 cloves of garlic.

Got oil hot in my wok.  I love my wok...it's seriously old-school, carbon steel.  You've got to season it just like a dutch oven.

I pulled a large green onion from the garden, and chopped it up while the oil heated.

Toss in the garlic.  Stir it a little, but on high heat it starts to brown right away.  Give it 45 seconds, and then toss in the onions to soak up the heat and keep the garlic from burning.

Stir the garlic and onions for a few minutes, and then add the beans.

Stir a few more minutes, then season with salt and pepper and plate it up.

Here's the finished product, with chopped peanuts on top.  It had good flavor, but I'd over-cooked the beans.  I wanted them a little firmer.  Still a tasty lunch, and I dish I will make again.

Ever had yard-long beans before?

Melons and the Summer Doldrums

Well, I'm back at home full-time, and back in the garden.  This was a harvest from over a week ago, probably the last really big harvest of the summer.  The peak of the tomato season is over.  Still plenty of fruit on the vines, but nothing like what it was 3 weeks ago.

The cabbages came in, and the banana melons are ripening one by one.

Some of them are really ugly on the outside, kinda twisted and gnarled-looking.

However, the insides are gorgeous, soft, and sweet.  They taste just like regular cantaloupe.

Last week I picked this monster banana melon.  My mother took a picture of me holding my baby.  Can you see the resemblance?

I sliced big boy open and attacked him with an ice cream scoop.  He produced about 2/3 gallon of ripe fleshy melon balls.  I was so proud.

The Spice of Life

We are growing something like ten different kinds of tomatoes.  These normal red round guys above are Park Early Hybrids and Rutgers.  I actually can't tell them apart.

Here's our really yummy yellow tomatoes.  Good slicers.

These are the Mortgage Lifters, an heirloom pink beefsteak tomato.  Apparently they are called that because the guy who developed the seed paid off his house by selling them.

Cherokee Purples, a classic.

This is a yellow/orange beef tomato.  I bought one of these tomatoes from a Farmer's Market last year mainly to get the seeds.  This is the largest tomato my garden has ever produced.  I have the LEGO dude and sunglasses just to show the scale of this monster.

These are Paul Robeson Hybrid tomatoes.  They are very dark, black-type fruit from Siberia.

These are Tomande tomatoes.  Don't know much about them, other than they were on sale.  They're kinda orange.

Cherry tomatoes here.   Left to right, these are Chocolate Cherries, Ildis, and Supersweets.  The Supersweets are from volunteer plants.  There's like 4 of them in different parts of the garden.

So those are the types of tomatoes in the Givler Garden.

Pumping Out Tomatoes

With work taking up a huge amount of time right now, I am having to be very strategic about how I spend my free time.  I enjoy the blogging, but it's not a pressing concern, while spending time with the family is at the top of the list, and gardening is in the #2 slot.  The garden is needy, and it is pumping out tomatoes like crazy.  The picture above was from about 30 minutes of picking I did yesterday.

This was the Sunday tomato harvest.

This was the rest of the Sunday picking.  See the cabbage...Angelia fixed her delicious creamy cabbage yesterday and used it all up.

This was a harvest from last week.  Zucchini the size of baseball bats.  It's hard to catch them when they are younger and more delicious, although these guys will taste just fine sauteed with onions.  

I'll have another post soon about the different varieties of tomatoes that I'm harvesting.  What's your favorite kind of tomato?

Long Time No Garden

A little over a week ago, a co-worker had to take a leave of absence, and I was the back-up for the role he filled.  This resulted in me instantaneously becoming the camp director of a resident camp that will see about 1,000 campers over the space of 5 weeks.  Just to keep things interesting, I stepped in as camp director 6 days before the dreaded "National Visitation."  Essentially, an inspection of the summer camp by our accrediting organization.  


So, the picture above is the last harvest before I left for camp on Sunday, June 24.  Angelia volunteered to water the garden, which she did like a champ for the past week.  While I was gone, a huge thunderstorm hit, knocking down the sunflowers and one of the bean teepees.  Angelia and the boys were out there the next day, hacking up broken plants and resetting the teepee.  They also took out the mustard greens.  When I got home, the garden looked good.  Here's some images from Saturday, June 30...

Most of the green 'maters above were knocked down by the storm.  I do not pick green tomatoes on purpose.

At the top of this picture are my prize lemon (or yellow) cucumbers.  They taste almost the same as regular cukes, but their round shape and smaller size makes it easier to eat them raw, like an apple.  I also picked two very early eggplant, just below the lemon cukes.

Here's the complete harvest from Saturday.  Well, almost complete.  I did "sell" maybe 2 dozen tomatoes, some squash, carrots, kohl rabi, cucumbers, and herbs on Saturday.  I use that term "sell" loosely, because what I charged was about 3 times cheaper than grocery store prices.  

Saturday was incredibly hot, over 100 degrees, but the garden needed some work...mainly tying up vigorous tomato plants, but also ripping out plants that had gone to seed...Chinese Cabbage, lettuce...and planting in the space they vacated.  I put in pumpkins and another small section of summer squash.

Sunday was another harvest.  One of the largest tomatoes ever out of the garden is this Cherokee Purple.  The top is greenish but the bottom is this pretty pink-purple color.

Here's the Sunday harvest.  We had another storm on Saturday night, with an actual tornado touching down in the county where we live, so there's a few more green tomatoes.

There are some pluses to summer camp.  Being away from the garden means that the growth is dramatic when you get home.  It's also berry season at camp.  The other day after we passed inspection, I took a walk and found these sweet red raspberries.  There's blackberries all over the place, but the raspberries are a real treat.  I wonder how they would do transplanted...Hmm....