I Got The Blues

Blue is not just for flowers anymore!

Beautiful Blue Borage Brings Bees to the Beds

We have plenty of blue this year. Blue is really a novelty color in vegetable breeding, and growers are pulling out all the stops and developing some intense color.

The deep purpley blue of the blue podded peas is hard to capture on camera. It straddles the line between unique and grotesque.


The flowers are really the high point of these peas. The blue pods are pretty when fresh and new, but as they mature they darken to a morbid purple. It does make them easy to find on the vine. The peas are sweet enough, nothing to compare to modern sweet varieties, and the texture is rather dry and pithy. The pea seeds themselves are pale, and stand out a rather sickly shade in a plate of fresh cooked peas. This will not become a standby favorite of mine, although I'm sure I will grow it again just because it is interesting to watch. It falls in the class of ornamental novelty for me. Almost as pretty as ornamental sweet peas, way easier to grow, and edible as a bonus.

The garden is in full swing. We are eating squash, beans, peppers, onions and I've sampled the first of the Sun Gold cherry tomatoes.



The Purple Queen bush beans are a favorite of mine. (pictured with Magda squash)

Purple Queen is a beautiful dark green plant with stunning purple stems. The flowers are two tone purple, and the beans themselves are like frosted amethyst art glass making them easy to find, and a joy to pick. I try to pick these very early and slender as they quickly get coarse and over mature. Unfortunately, when you cook them, they turn regular boring green, leaving the cooking water a shocking lime jell-o green.



And look at this!

I picked these before supper, rinsed them and put them in a bag in the fridge. When I took them out, I noticed the water in the bag had turned a brilliant blue as if I had added food coloring. Fascinating!

Lots going on in the garden right now, and I think this might be a pickling weekend! Tim (who peels them and eats them like Popsicles) is not staying ahead of the cuke harvest and the onslaught is just beginning...

See the mishapen ones? That is from poor pollination. They are usually found tucked away in heavy foliage. Luckily, the honey bees have found the garden, and the borage/cuke row is a busy buzzy hive of activity. These cukes are all Marketmore. I have a second row of Sweet Success which is two weeks behind and just beginning to bloom.

When I'm not watering, picking and pickling, I will be doing my rain dance.

WE NEED RAIN BADLY! The 500 gallon rain water tank is half empty, and if we don't get the forecasted rain on Monday, Tim will have to bring the auxiliary rain barrel with the hand pump over to the garden. I long to wake up to the sound of rain on the window, roll over, and enjoy an extra half hour of sleep.

In the Bleak MidWinter

We have had over 5 feet of snow in December. At first it highlighted the raised beds nicely, and then erased them completely.

The garden shed remains snug and tidy, like a little gingerbread cottage.

And the snow continues to fall...

On Christmas Eve, the U.S. Mail brought a huge bundle of colorful seed catalogs. Usually we don't see them until after New Years Day. A fellow gardener, whose wife is a Postmaster, tells of her holding out on him as his seed catalogs sit in the back of her post office with their date stamp taunting him. Few things bring more joy and light to a gardener's winter home than those vibrant wish books.


As usual, I get a notepad and start jotting down ideas. Then I compare my wish list to my more practical shopping list written in August. Of course you have to allow yourself one or two impractical experiments each year. This year mine will be Blue Podded Peas.






Actually, this is sort of a practical experiment since you already know my views of being able to distinguish pickable parts from non-pickable parts. And the peas will fit nicely into my spring planting. Since the garden was under construction last spring, we missed out on all those early vegetables: Onions, Carrots, Peas, Lettuce, Chard etc. So that will be my focus this year.
I can not tell you how much I look forward to the start of gardening season. There will be no rototilling. No waiting for the mud to subside. No fence to put up. No rows to measure and mark. All I will have to do is stroll down the sidewalk, kneel beside my tidy little beds, already high and dry and prepared for planting, and poke the seeds in. Then I'll probably add a layer of fresh compost and voila'... instant garden!
I have already broken my list down by seed company. First I go for the specific varieties and harder to find items. Then I compare prices on similar items. Finally I fill up the gaps with the common things rounding out each order to make the most of shipping rates. You also have to watch for coupons. I am always suckered into Gurney's $25 offer. .... finally, you have to take into account the seed swap.
On my last post, Julie asked where she would find just a few seeds of sweet corn instead of half a pound. Well, some seeds keep quite well for a couple of years. Others are great for swapping and sharing with friends. For instance, in our neighborhood, Bob and Trish do the onion order. Shelly and I let Bob know what we want, and relinquish some control to his wisdom as Bob and Trish are far more experienced with Onions at this point. I've had great luck with the onion plants they have gotten me. I generally have extra of several kinds of seeds, and am happy to distribute my excess to anyone interested. If you still don't want a larger quantity of seeds, your best bet is to buy them off the seed displays at Garden stores and Big Box stores as those are packaged in much smaller quantities. I often pick some up when they are discounted to try varieties I would not have thought to order.
And some seed swapping is much more far reaching than the neighbors. Several people have expressed interest in planting my PaPaw's Barlow Jap tomatoes. I am still quite tickled to send out a dozen for free whenever anyone asks. And, as good seed trading etiquette dictates, they always reciprocate with a list of varieties they have to trade should I be interested. That's where my Blue Podded Peas are coming from!
I've been keeping an eye out on the gardening forums to see where the Barlow Jap has migrated through swapping and reswapping. So far, they have been grown in OH, PA, AL, NC and KY. Last week I sent some to TX and TN. And they have also jumped the pond and have been grown in Germany and South Africa. Now PaPaw would really get a kick out of that!

Too Many Tomatoes

I finally achieved "too many tomatoes" status this past weekend. Even after canning a batch, choosing one for lunch, and using them liberally in salads for days, I still had more tomatoes than I could eat all at once. I was so excited that I finally had a good assortment to take to my neighbor and fellow tomato nut Sheryl. Sheryl doesn't garden, but she loves tomatoes. Last summer I promised that this year, when the garden was in full swing, I would bring her a sampling. Sunday I was able to put together a little gift basket and a handwritten list of what they were. This little basket of tomatoes looks like a wonderful present to me. I hope she enjoyed them.

Pink~ Barlow Jap (PaPaw's tomato)

Green ~ Ananas Noire (One of my favorites)

Golden ~ Dr. Wyche (new to me this year, and a great yellow variety that I will grow again)

Yellow ~ Super Snow White

Green shouldered cherry ~ Black Cherry (new to me this year and just beginning to ripen)

And of course a sprinkling of the Sun Gold cherries.

What's Growing ~ Bush Beans

Bush beans are one of my favorite garden crops. There is nothing that can compare to fresh picked green beans or even the ones you freeze yourself. Canned beans just won’t ever compare. Tim’s Uncle Lloyd, who now lives in South Carolina, says one of his friends once told him “That’s the thing about Northerners, they under cook their green beans.” You’re darn right we do! They should squeak when you bite them. And we under cook our corn on the cob too… or you Southerners over cook yours, depending on your point of view. But that’s a topic for another day. Every time Lloyd comes to visit, I make him green beans and corn on the cob. He seems to prefer the Northern cooking methods. If not, he’s too Southern to say otherwise.

The bush beans are just now coming on strong. And this is where I must make my first mention of “gardening for the old and myopic”. I prefer yellow or purple beans. Why? Because I can see to pick them. This is doubly important in bush beans because they’re low to the ground, and they look a lot like stems. Plus the yellow Goldmine beans from Burpee are just beautiful creamy beans.

And the Purple Queen… I’ve rarely seen a more gorgeous vegetable. Those purple pods look like frosted art glass hanging against bright green leaves. They’re simply stunning. The only problem with purple beans is when you cook them they turn boring green. The water, however turns a brilliant green. I’m talking lime jello green. It’s rather shocking.

My favorite green variety of bush bean is Blue Lake 47. I’ve tried a few others such as Contender and Tenderpick, but Blue Lake has the yield and the quality that I’m looking for so it’s the one I go back to year after year. This year I also planted Isar yellow filet bean. It will be a little while before they produce, so the jury is still out on that one.

I start planting the bush beans in mid-May, and keep planting a row every week or two until I run out of space or beans. I’m planning to plant another row or two in the coming week. I’ve found that the Goldmine variety, if you leave them alone when their first crop is over, will rally again the end of August and produce a nice second crop. That is if the weather is milder and they don’t burn up and dry out before then, and you are kind to them when you harvest the beans and don’t break the heck out of the plants. It’s also important to keep them picked and not let any get too mature or the plants will just plain quit.

Green Bean Facts:

• Beans are one of the longest-cultivated plants. The common bean has been cultivated for six thousand years in the Americas.


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  Beans were an important source of protein throughout Old and New World history, and still are today.
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  There are over 4,000 cultivars of bean on record in the United States alone.
  Most of the kinds commonly eaten fresh come from the Americas, being first seen by a European when Christopher Columbus during his exploration of what may have been the Bahamas, found them being grown in fields
  
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  Fresh green beans are very low in calories and contain no saturated fat; but are very good source of vitamins, minerals and plant derived micro-nutrients.


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  They are very rich source of dietary fiber
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  Green beans contain excellent levels of vitamin A, and many health promoting flavonoid poly phenolic antioxidants such as lutein, zeaxanthin and beta carotene in good amounts.
  They contain good amounts of vitamin-B6 (pyridoxine), thiamin (vitamin B-1), vitamin-C. and minerals like iron, calcium, magnesium, manganese and potassium which are very essential for body metabolism.
  
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  Snap beans got their nickname from the snapping sound they make when being broken.
  String beans are called that because most varieties used to have a long fibrous string that ran along the seam of the bean. Botanists found a way to remove the string and in 1894 the first successful stringless bean plant was cultivated.