Beans Beans the Magical Fruit

Posted on September 14, 2010 by jkmcintyre


Possibly the most exciting time of the garden year is when I pick my shelling beans. Planted in May when the soil gets nice and toasty, the bush beans grow like snap beans at first – and can be eaten as such if you are not waiting for the dry September jewels.

Left on the vine the pods yellow, then dry to a crackly, rattling finish. I pick them as soon as they start to rattle in their tawny pods. I split open the husks and – voila! – jewels inside. (Click on photo for enlarged view)


This year I am growing two varieties of dry beans. Tiger’s Eye from Seeds of Change (2009) and Ying Yang from Territorial Seed (2010). They are so beautiful that I am reluctant to eat them at all.



Every few days I head out to the garden to find more pods that rattle. I bring them inside to dry completely over another few days. Then I pop them and store the seeds in bowls where I fondle them until the harvest is complete.

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Potatoes by Olla or Not – Here is the Answer!

Posted on September 4, 2010 by jkmcintyre


In the last post I compared potatoes watered by olla vs hand-watering. I found that I got similar yields, but higher efficiency using ollas (pounds/seed).

How does using ollas compare to my control plot in 2010? Check it out:

Olla Bed: 16.75#, 1.4 #/seed
Control Bed: 10.7#, 0.6 #/seed

So. Compared to my other option for growing potatoes out by the street (no water), using ollas increased my yield by 60% and was more than twice as efficient!

Qualitatively, the potatoes from the olla bed (half russetts and half red sangre) were a mix of sizes distributed from large to small. In contrast, the control bed (mostly red sangre, the better producer) produced mostly small potatoes, with only a few medium-sized (photo above).

Conclusion? Ollas rock. Compared to not watering at all, they produced more and larger potatoes more efficiently. Compared to hand-watering, ollas increased potato production efficiency.

Here is the control bed in photos (compare with olla bed).

Planted May 18


June 7


July 12


July 21


August 4


August 14


We dug the potatoes in the control bed on August 30 after the fronds had all died back.

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Digging Potatoes II

Posted on September 2, 2010 by jkmcintyre


On Aug 14 we dug the Red Sangre potatoes in the olla bed.

Red Sangre Summary

2009: Planted April 11, harvested Sept 4, 9.5# from 12 seeds, 0.8 #/seed
2010: Planted April 16, harvested Aug 30, 9.75# from 6 seeds, 1.6 #/seed

Compare this with the russett results from July 27:

2009: Planted April 11, harvested Sept 4, 7# from 10 seeds, 0.7 #/seed
2010: Planted April 16, harvested July 27, 7# pounds from 6 seeds, 1.2 #/seed

Analysis:

Red Sangre were better producers than the russetts, yielding similar total pounds across years and methods.

Potatoes were produced much more efficiently by olla than by hand-watering, with roughly twice the efficiency (#/seed). Yes, these were different years in different beds, but I’m satisfied that the ollas work at least as well, and quite possibly better than hand watering.

Not to mention that watering (filling) the ollas required less labour than watering by hand and, although I did not measure water usage, would certainly have been more efficient.

Finally, I filled the ollas approximately weekly during the hottest driest part of summer, and much less often before and after that.

Stay tuned for the next post on Olla vs Control Plots!

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Burgandy Beauties

Posted on August 13, 2010 by jkmcintyre


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!

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