Today’s haul:
This is on top of an additional 25 Roma tomatoes, 2 Kellogg, 2 Brandywine & half pint of Sungolds that are up on the counter. And I’m not seeing Stella Caroline this week. I wonder how much it would cost me to FedEx….?
The green beans in the photo are Kentucky Wonder pole beans. I have been calling them Kentucky runner beans, which is only half true (they are running away from us, so that part is true.) Kentucky Wonder is a very old heirloom that has been known by many other names over the years, including American Sickle Pole, Eastern Wonder, Egg Harbor, Georgia Monstrous Pole, Improved Southern Prolific, Missouri Prolific, Old Homestead Pole and Texas Pole. An online catalog describes them as, “…..very reliable, early maturing, and productive.” They should really use the word “prolific” in the bean name, because that might give me pause when calculating how many to plant. I would also rewrite the description to say, “Very reliable, early maturing, and will bury you and everyone you know in beans.” But this is mostly my fault – I put in 6 hills of the beans, with 8 bean plants per hill. And I’m pretty sure every one of those suckers came up. So, 48 plants. Next year, for the love of Pete, someone please remind me that this is too many when I’m all excited in the middle of May to plant the beans. I need someone to come stand in the field and shout at me when I start trying to rationalize and say things like, “But they might not all come up!” or “What if some of the plants don’t produce?” They will all produce, apparently.
Underneath our Kentucky beans are our usual purple bush beans, and to the right are Roma tomatoes (totally out of control this year, the plants are tipping over from the weight of the tomatoes) and the left is a bowl of Sungolds with a Brandywine for a little change of color. There are too many Sungolds to fit in the ceramic pint container I usually keep them in.
So this batch of beans will be the first batch that I freeze. The best way to preserve beans through freezing is to blanch them first, to kill off any bacteria or enzymes that might cause them to become discolored during the freezing process. I usually submerge them for 3 – 4 minutes, then plunge them into ice water and dump them into a strainer before laying them out on towels to fully dry before freezing them in freezer bags. My online research tells me that they are best used within a 10-month period, but I have found that they are fine up to and past a year later. Why yes, we do have beans frozen from last year in our freezer, however did you guess?