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Category Archives: beans
Burgandy Beauties
Royal Burgandy Beans!
These lovely beans are dark purple, but bright green just under the skin. The purple pigment is a built-in indicator of done-ness in the kitchen – the whole bean turns green when ready to eat. Often I steam my beans, or put them through a light boil. The purple slowly fades to green. When we sauteed them the other day (with our freshly harvested garlic – YUM!), some spots were cooking and others were not – creating these gorgeous purple-and-green patterns on the beans. We left some of them with purple blotches, but they were indeed not quite cooked!
The Black Aphid
Black aphids love nasturtiums. Love them to death, in my case. I’d never seen a black aphid before I planted nasturtiums last year. They didn’t appear to move beyond my nasturtiums, so I simply observed.
I have been using nasturtiums in the garden as a natural pest control. They “repel squash bugs and whiteflies and draw beneficial insects”, according to one of my books. What I couldn’t decide last year was if nasturtiums drew pests away from my other plants or if they drew pests to the garden more generally, serving as a jumping off point. Continue reading
Posted in beans, tomatillos
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