vituperation

This is for you, Howard Zinn, you pompous asshole.
Go fuck yourself.

The garden is really starting to kick in now. Everything (except for the cukes and second planting of green beans) is either producing or on the verge of it. The only things I haven’t picked anything from are the melons and the black-eyed peas. Right now, most of the cantaloupes are about softball-sized and the watermelons are like soccer balls. The black-eyed peas have started putting out pods with a ferocity that’s a little daunting.

I fear that I’ll need a bushel basket when it’s time to pick them.

Japanese Beetles have invaded, but so far they’re not TOO bad. There’s a certain weed that they seem to like more than the garden, so I’ve let it grow up around the border and they congregate on those. I gather up a handful or two every day and feed them to the chickens, who go into a frenzy trying to eat them before they fly off.

The beetles have done a little damage to the okra and the green beans, but it’s not so bad. A spraying of Sevin seemed to help. I also hung a beetle lure in the chicken yard in hopes that they’d fly in and get eaten, but the lure doesn’t seem to be luring. That, or the chickens are just keeping them eaten. Either way, I haven’t seen a single beetle in the chicken yard.

Here’s what a typical day’s picking might look like. The picture below is from Monday afternoon:

A bounty.

Most days, I get a pretty good haul. Rarely do I get a lot of any one thing; I generally get a little bit of everything. Yesterday, however, in addition to my usual “little bit of everything,” I found when I got to the corn that people weren’t kidding when they told me it would all come in at once.

I gained independence from Green Giant niblet corn yesterday:

It took me about an hour, but I finally got it ready to pass off to Robyn for freezing and canning:

I mistakenly said we had Silver Queen corn in a previous entry.
It’s actually “Golden Queen.” Sometimes I just make things up and present them as fact.

I try to pick the green beans every other day or every couple of days. Yesterday, I got about six pounds:

Light ones: Contender bush beans
Dark ones: Kentucky Wonder pole beans

Green beans are one of my favorite veggies. They’re a staple down here in the south, like okra and black-eyed peas. The green beans have been bugging me a little, though, because they’ve been kind of stringy and I made sure to buy stringless varieties. I try not to let them get too big (hence the very regular picking), but still, they seem stringy.

If you’ve never eaten a stringy green bean, there’s not much that’s grosser. If you want to experience it, but don’t have any stringy ones handy, do this: Buy a bag or can of regular green beans, then cut a nice long piece of waxed dental floss into little pieces and stir them in. Make sure you use waxed floss, because unwaxed doesn’t have the unique stiffness and feel that waxed does.

Eat up, and tell me what you think when the little pieces of floss get stuck to the back of your throat.

When I first started picking beans, I was picking green black beans along with the green beans, mistakenly thinking I’d screwed up and planted more green beans instead of black beans. Those beans were stringy as hell, but otherwise tasty. When I mentioned the stringiness of my beans on a forum yesterday, someone suggested that the black beans were cross-breeding with the green beans because they’re right next to each other.

That made sense to me, a non-geneticist, so after some mulling, I decided to pull up the black beans. They were planted as a lark because I happened to see a packet of them in Lowe’s one day. The black beans were for fun, the green beans were for serious food.

I went out in the middle of the day yesterday and uprooted all the black bean plants. Fortunately, I had my old man straw hat on, or I might have suffered a sunstroke. As I pulled up the plants, I picked all the bean pods that had visible beans off and pitched them into my pickin’ tub before tossing the plant over the corn and out of the garden. I spread all the green pods out on the patio to dry in the sun. I don’t know if I’ll get anything from them, because I’m kind of clueless here and too lazy to go read up on it, but I might as well try to get something out of that $1.25 I spent on the seeds, right?

As I picked, I found several pods already dried on the plant and shelled them:

Not enough for soup, but enough for a side dish with a meal.

Once I’d pulled up all the bean plants and harvested what I could, I went back in and found that the resident gardening guru on the forum had posted. Apparently, while it’s technically possible for the beans to cross-pollinate, chances are good that they wouldn’t, and even if they did, I wouldn’t see the results unless I tried to grow plants from the cross-pollinated seeds.

Too late now, I reckon.

Later, around 3:00, I went back out and gathered up the black bean plants and put them on the burn pile. Then, I went through the corn and pulled up all the empty stalks and put them on the burn pile, too. Finally, I weeded around the okra and green beans, and cleaned up the area where the black beans were growing.

Time to plant something new there, I think.

“Too bad Jason can’t see this,” the spud said, changing the subject. She gestured at the garden.

We stood by the row of thirty tomato plants, all heavily laden with green fruit. Here and there, ripe red ones were visible. I was picking cherry tomatoes, which are producing with a vengeance, while she walked with me and gave me the latest gossip in her life. Jason was the spud’s last boyfriend. They broke up in April or May.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because he used to laugh and tell me you’d never be able to grow a garden.”

Jason was a country boy, born and raised, and thought himself something of an expert on all things country. He got on my bad side when I tried to enlist his help in convincing Robyn we needed goats and he disdainfully told me we didn’t want any animals because farm animals stunk.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yep. He said you’re too much of a city boy to make it.”

“Did you tell him that I never fail when I set my mind on something?”

Well, almost never.

“No. Too bad he can’t see it, though.”

Yesterday’s failed cherry tomatoes.

The plan for the garden was for it to feed us year round. I haven’t made my mind up yet on whether or not I’m going to try a winter garden, because I like summer vegetables a lot better. I may try some greens, and Robyn wants some cabbage, but beyond that I don’t know.

We’re working hard on making the summer garden produce enough to feed us through the winter. Robyn has been a freezing and canning fool, and our dehydrator should get here on Friday. Right off the bat, we’re planning on loading it up with cherry tomatoes. Most of the cherries I’m growing are SunGold, and are the sweetest tomatoes I think I’ve ever had. I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ll taste like dried.

Here’s what our freezer looks like right now:

Winter’s fare awaits.

So far, Robyn’s canned green beans and pickled zucchini, jalapenos, and yellow squash. When the pickling spices are out, the house smells mighty fine. Yesterday, she tried her hand at kosher dill zucchini pickles. I can’t wait to try them:

Below is our growing collection of canned food. Now that the corn and tomatoes are starting in, it should grow pretty quickly:

Robyn’s asked me to build her a cabinet to keep the jars in. I predict it will be very ugly, but very sturdy.

Miss Mama, who does not belong to us, likes to come in through the
cat door and help herself to the cat food…

…before making herself at home for a bit of shuteye.