Dried Beans!

 I have a goal to try something new in our garden each year and this year the new thing was dried beans. We eat a lot of dried beans around here!

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to plant them, so being the impatient one that I am... (well, it's not really impatience, it's just that if I don't do something at the moment that I am thinking about it, then a million other things pop up and I forget about the original thing and...anyhoo...) I decided to try planting the dried beans that were in our pantry. The pintos were a generic Walmart brand, and I had Sugar Baby pick the black beans from a bag of 15 bean soup mix.

The beans grew beautifully! I think they probably should have been supported (as in pole beans) but they were planted so thickly that they became woven together and held each other up for the most part.

We left them in the garden long enough for the plants to dry out and then put all of the plants - stems, pods, roots and all still intact - on our covered porch to dry out even further for another week. I had read online somewhere that you can tell when they are sufficiently dry when you are unable to dent them with your fingernail. It was really hard to wait - we were eager to shell them and see what we had.


We began shelling them in an organized fashion... neat little piles of beans and neat piles of already opened pods...

Then everyone wanted to join in! It became way less organized but way more fun. We chatted, joked and tried to convince ourselves that we had really saved a lot of money by growing them. In the end, we admitted that we hadn't really saved a lot, but it was such a fun experience that we are planning to do it again next year. And maybe add chick peas to the mix.

 

 Lily (formerly known as Queenie) shelled a lovely little bowl of black beans.

The boys had ideas for more efficient ways of shelling the beans. Sammy decided to beat - thresh them.

It actually worked rather well.

There was a lot of chaff/debris left with the beans this way so he found a way to winnow it away.

 

It worked!

 

It's funny - we had never appreciated the beauty of dried black beans until we grew our own.

 

And pintos too.

We ended up with a gallon of pintos and a quart and a half of black beans. That was from about a cup of pintos and maybe a fourth of a cup of black beans that we planted originally. It was a pretty decent yield and a very pleasant memory to boot!

Someone had a fun naptime. That was a box of tissues, mistakenly left within his reach!

Canning!

Our garden has been producing abundantly this year! I think our blueberry bushes have produced at least 2 dozen gallons of berries this year... so many for eating fresh, freezing, giving away, and canning.

 

 

The twins have loved picking and eating blueberries. They quickly learned which berries were not so good for eating. This guy would pick a berry and if it wasn't dark blue, he'd offer it to his brother.

 

Queenie helped me make jam. It was fun for her to ladle the lava-hot jam into the jars.

                                   Our cupboard filled up quickly with the summer bounty.

We made our usual favorites - peach, blackberry, and blueberry jams, pickles (both dill and bread & butter), tomatoes, marinara sauce and green beans. And we also tried a few new ones, like blueberry syrup, blueberry pie filling, elderberry jam, corn cob jelly, peach salsa and pickled peppers. Some were a hit, some not so much - like the corn cob jelly. It has a bit of a weird, tangy flavor. It was fun trying something new though. :)

Twenty Years!

Today marks my and hubby's 20th anniversary! What an exciting milestone to reach! I pray that we have many more ahead of us. :)