Seed Saving -- Heirloom Bush Beans

After eating beans for a few weeks from my early August planting of Aunt Joanie beans, I have let the rest of the bean pods mature on the plants. The ripe (old, pale, tough) pods are not good to eat, but the beans are good to save for planting next year.

Mature bean pods for seed-saving. PHOTO/Amygwh

Mature seeds set aside for drying. PHOTO/Amygwh

Beans for seed-saving need to be fully developed, which means they are at the stage when you might use them as dry beans in the kitchen. 

In drier climates, mature bean pods can be left on the plants until they are "rattle dry". The pods will be brown and brittle and easy to shell out.

Here in the Southeastern US, we are not having the kind of dry weather that allows for bean pods to dry to brittleness. Instead, we are having the kind of humidity and rain that encourages mildews and fungi.

That means I am shelling out leathery pods, not brittle ones, and the beans still are plump with moisture.

Also, some of the pods are mildewed.

When I shell out the mildewed pods and find  unblemished bean seeds, then those beans can be saved for seeds. I don't save seeds that look infected or damaged, because I don't want to have my whole next crop be ruined by a fungus.

I also don't save seeds from pods that contain fewer than three seeds inside. I don't want to encourage plants that produce puny bean pods, and I am pretty sure that if I saved seeds from a lot of short pods, soon enough my entire crop would mostly have short pods.

Diseased seeds will not be saved. See the spots? PHOTO/Amygwh

Before storing the bean seeds for planting in another season, they need to be very dry. I leave the seed beans out on the counter to dry for several days (or more) until they are so dry that one hit by a hammer shatters instead of smashes.

As they dry, these beans will get smaller, and they also will turn to a gentle tan color. They really are beautiful beans!

When the seed-beans are very dry, I will make an envelope for them, label with the season they were grown in (Joanie Beans, Aug-Oct 2017), then store them in one of my airtight containers in the fridge. Next year, or even five or six or more years from now, these seeds will still be good for planting.

Bush Beans - A Quick Crop

I planted a little patch (about 2 x 3 feet) of heirloom Aunt Joanie Beans in the first week of August, and today I harvested the first beans from that patch. That puts the days-to-maturity (or days-to-harvest) at about 50 days for this variety of beans. There are not many vegetable crops that can be brought to the kitchen so quickly!

First harvest of Joanie Beans from an early August planting.

This first day's harvest is not enormous, I know, but after I washed and snapped the beans you can see in the picture, they measured a little more than a cup and a half. That is enough for two people to enjoy at suppertime.

If there were more of us here to split the harvest with, I would tuck these into the fridge and keep adding more each day until there were enough saved up.

The little plants have many more beans and flowers on them, at various stages of development, so more beans are definitely on the way! By tomorrow, an amount of beans similar to what I brought in today should be ready to pick.

The first frost for my yard does not usually arrive until the beginning of November, so we will be able to harvest beans from this patch for several weeks.

What are you harvesting this week?

Starting Again in August

New little patch of Joanie Beans, for a late crop. PHOTO/Amygwh

My little patch of the heirloom Joanie Beans, planted a couple of weeks ago, has come up. If all goes well, the plants should start providing beans for our meals before the end of September.

It is very strange to have spent so long away from the garden and to not have summer crops coming in from the yard. We are visiting the local farmers market for many of our veggies instead, and that is a very good substitute, but I do like to grow some our our own food.

In the good-news category, my friend Cheryl has been helping a local farmer, Lynn, at her weekend market booth, for several years, and she gets to take home a box of leftover veggies after the market closes on Sunday.

This past Sunday, my friend shared some of those veggies with us, so my dehydrator is full of chopped peppers and sliced tomatoes. Thank you Friend Cheryl and Farmer Lynn!

Caterpillar of a Monarch Butterfly on swamp milkweed. PHOTO/Amygwh

To make sure that at least some of my veggies this fall come from the yard, I already have started a batch of seeds in a tray. I will be starting more this weekend, since seedlings are often eaten by pests, burned up in the hot sun, or pounded to smithereens in summer storms, which makes growing some extra a good idea, but I am happy to have made the start.

In the first tray, there are a few each of kale, winter radishes, mini bok choy, beets, and collards, and a short row of green bunching onions. The next tray will have more of the above, plus lettuces. I won't start the spinach until in September, because it is so finicky about hot weather.

More good news - my milkweed is doing exactly what I hoped it would do: host some monarch butterfly caterpillars. Of course, there are also a bunch of weird orange aphids and milkweed bugs, but the caterpillars were the goal, and they are there.

The Summer Garden Looks Toward Fall

We are just about at the mid-summer crossover point, when many of the summer vegetables are either at or just beyond their peak of productivity.  Pepper plants are loaded with ripening fruit, tomatoes are almost flying into the kitchen, zucchini plants have been felled by the borers after piling up lots of squashes, winter squashes are big and beginning to turn from green to tan. You get the idea.

We've made pickles with some of our cucumbers, and we have hot peppers fermenting in jars on the counter for a Tabasco-style sauce. In addition, the dehydrator has been busily turning slices of tomatoes into chips that we can re-hydrate in winter for use in cooking. The dry tomato-chips are a great snack, too.

Meanwhile, the okra pods have only just begun to come into the kitchen. Those plants are typically slow-starters, but they will produce until frost.

Over the past weekend, I pulled out lettuces that had been left in the garden to produce seeds. I will be leading a seed-saving workshop next week (Thursday, at the Extension office), and I wanted to have lettuces for participants to see and pull seeds from. After clearing that garden space, I dumped on some more compost, mixed in an organic fertilizer that I hadn't tried before, and planted seeds for a late patch of bush beans.

The pole beans we are eating from the garden now are Blue Marbut (find them in the pole/snap category on the linked page) and I LOVE these, but a friend (thank you, Kim!) gave me a little packet of Dragon's Tongue bush beans to try, so those are what I planted. Hopefully, they will germinate and grow in this hotter-than-usual July. The seeds were in one of the beautiful packets from Hudson Valley Seed Library, so I can enjoy the artwork while I wait for my plants to appear.

The next space that opens up in the garden will be sown with buckwheat as a place-holder (some people would say "cover crop") before re-clearing the space for a fall crop. Even though the weather will still be quite toasty, I am sure, mid-August is the time to get some of our cool-season crops seeded into the ground.

Long, Slow Spring

Into the kitchen...

My garden strawberry plants are almost finished with their production for this year. I will miss the sweet little fruits when they stop coming in, but I chose a "June-bearing" variety on purpose.

In about a week, after the last berries have been picked, I can pull up the bird netting, cut off all the old foliage, remove about half of the old plants, leaving some of the babies that have been sent out on runners, and generally refresh that whole bed.

Then, the only work to be done over the coming year will be a little weeding, amending the soil, and topping off the mulch, until next spring when, once again, I get to harvest big bowls full of berries every day for several weeks.

The end of the strawberries is going to draw a definitive line in the seasons for my yard, with the far side of the line being "summer." Some people might ague that we've had some plenty-hot weather already, but the last of the spring veggies are still producing in my garden.

My strawberry patch.

The potatoes already are out; I dug them up last weekend (and they are glorious!), but the kale is still doing well in the garden, and we have a few more beets. All of that will be pulled this weekend, though, so I can FINALLY plant the last of the peppers and get some okra seeds into the ground.

Meanwhile, I harvested the first zucchini yesterday when I got home from work, and we will have green beans from the garden today. The tomato plants have little green tomatoes coming along, but we won't have ripe tomatoes until early July.

Summer Harvests Begin

Provider bush beans, 27 May 2015.

I took the pictures to the right yesterday morning, early, before the sun was fully up and before I drove to work. The lighting, as a result, is a little weird, but the idea comes across: The first of the summer crops are ready to harvest!

We still are eating lettuces and other spring crops from the garden, but three days this week my lunchbox has included home-grown green beans. Soon, our home-grown zucchini will join them, then raspberries, then cucumbers, onions, garlic, potatoes, blueberries...

In my mind, I can see our garden crops coming into the kitchen in sequence, like waves rolling to shore. 

Meanwhile, I am still planting warm season crops. The okra and nasturtiums went into the ground just this past weekend.

Saving Seeds for Beans

Part of my gardening includes saving seeds from some crops to plant next year. Beans are among the easiest crops for gardeners to save. The risk of cross-pollination is low, and cleaning the seeds is mostly a matter of shelling them out, sorting through to remove any that look "off," and waiting for them to dry before storing them in the fridge.

I usually place my seeds in the chest freezer for a few days after they seem very dry, before moving them into the fridge with the rest of the seeds, just in case there are any hitch-hiking critters in the seeds that might cause trouble in storage. These in the picture are almost dry enough to store.

Bush bean seeds to plant next year.

This is not the only variety of beans that I am growing and saving. The beans in the picture above are from some "Provider" bush bean plants, and the others, that only recently reached maturity, are my friend Becky's "Joanie beans."

Even though the risk of cross-pollination with beans is fairly low, I planted the Joanie Beans much later than the Provider beans, so there would be no chance of crossing between the varieties.

For all kinds of beans, it's best to leave the pods hanging on the plants until they are brown and dry before bringing them in to shell out for sorting and saving the seeds. As the Providers were reaching that stage, there was a lot of rain in the forecast, and I had to bring them in a little sooner than I would have preferred; if they had been left out in the rain, the risk of mold on the beans would have gone way up.

Most of the beans look good, though. For my little garden, the amount in the basket above is enough for two or three years of planting. That is very good news for my seed-budget! 

Harvesting Summer to Make Room for Fall

About 2/3 of my butternut squash harvest.    PHOTO/Amy W.

It's been a busy weekend in the garden. To start, I harvested most of the remaining butternut squash. Six had already been brought inside, because the vine they were on looked "done."

These in the photo to the right were also on some pretty dead-looking vines, but there are three more immature butternut squash out in the garden. After tracing their vines so I could determine whether they had a chance of further ripening, I left their vines behind when I removed the other, browned-out plants. So far, I have brought in about 25 pounds of butternut squash. That has opened up some space in the garden.

Browned vascular tissue caused by a tomato wilt disease.  PHOTO/ Amy W.

I also harvested all the remaining Amish tomatoes, even the green ones. In last week's post I had mentioned that the plant had a lot of yellowed, drooping foliage, and it was time to pull up that plant.

After slicing through the stem to check on what had caused the trouble, it was easy to see the gunked-up vascular system, which often is caused by Fusarium wilt. A healthy stem would have been white or whitish-green all the way through, rather than being ringed inside with brown!

As space has opened up in the garden, I've planted some more seeds. Today I planted some kale, collards, lettuces, nasturtiums, and English peas. If they don't do well from seed at this time, it won't be a disaster, because I have started some of those in a flat already.

Caterpillar of the Gulf fritillary butterfly.  PHOTO/Amy W.

The English peas are part of yet another experiment. I harvested most of the popcorn, and as I was cutting the stalks down to chop up for the compost pile, I decided to leave them cut at about 3.5-4 feet high, for peas to climb up. The peas are planted in the rows between the cornstalks. It will be interesting to see how that space goes as the summer/fall progresses.

Elsewhere in the garden, we have some surprisingly unattractive caterpillars. They are dark orange with black spines, and they are busy defoliating the passionflower vine.

Bees loving a passionflower to smithereens. PHOTO/Amy W.

The caterpillars are the babies of the Gulf fritillary butterfly which also is orange, but it seems a lot prettier.

The passionflower vine is getting a lot of insect activity. In addition to being host to the spiky caterpillars, it also is host to some big, shiny carpenter bees that spend most of their days, it seems, loving on the purple flowers.

All that bee-loving action has resulted in the formation of a lot of "may-pops" on the passionflower vines. I am looking forward to trying those fruits!

Beans, Berries, and Cukes

Sunday's harvest.

Daily harvests for the past several days haven't been wildly varied, but it's pretty hard to complain when what's in the basket is so very delicious.

Saturday it was beans, berries and cukes. Sunday it was beans, berries and cukes. Yesterday it was beans, berries, and cukes, and I am guessing that the pattern will hold for several more days.

On Sunday, I did pull the onions and lay them out on the porch to dry, along with most of the garlic. The potatoes are nearly ready, but not quite yet. Leaves are turning yellow and falling over, but I like to see a higher percentage of them looking absolutely done before digging up the spuds.

140 pots of basil seedlings.

Monday's harvest.

The cucumbers in the basket are Chicago Picklers and Beit Alpha. Most of the berries are Heritage, with some Wineberries and an unknown variety of strawberry mixed in. The green beans are Provider, and the Wax Beans are a new-to-me variety that I will have to look up again (the name has slipped my mind).

It's been several years since I've planted wax beans, and I had forgotten how great it is to actually be able to find the beans in all the foliage. The bright yellow beans almost glow against the background of green leaves.

The other photo is of a whole lot of basil seedlings. My workplace will be celebrating Horticulture week, July 7-11, and part of the celebration will include giving away basil seedlings to people who stop by the office that week. If anyone is worried about the crowded condition of the little plants - it may help to know that I plan to thin them to ~2 seedlings per pot sometime in the next few days.

Hope the harvests in other gardens are going well!

Kudzu Bug Update

A clearer picture of the impact of the kudzu bug on Georgia's roadsides, farms, and gardens is slowly emerging as information from across the state is gathered and evaluated by personnel at UGA.

The map below shows the speed at which this particular pest is spreading across the Southeast:


At a meeting about four weeks ago, Wayne Gardner, an Entomologist at UGA,  shared some very useful new information about these little stink bugs. It turns out that - so far -  they are most damaging to kudzu and soybeans. They don't seem to damage peanuts, but they have been observed feeding on wisteria.They also are seen on many other legume-family plants, but the amount of damage they inflict on those is unclear.

Gardner listed host plants for the kudzu bugs, and those that are legumes include: Lima beans, pole/string/green beans, lablab beans, pigeon peas, wisteria (both American and Chinese), American Yellowwood, lespedeza, peanut, crimson clover, clover, alfalfa, sicklepod, and black locust.

Non-legume host plants include: alligator weed, black willow, banana, cocklebur, cotton, fig, loquat, muscadine grape, pecan, pine trees, potato, satsuma mandarin, tnagerine, wax myrtle, wheat, and wild blackberry.

On most of the host plants, the bugs are present as adults, but they aren't reproducing on the plants, and the amount of damage done is yet to be established. The kudzu bugs are present in all stages of the lifecycle on soybeans and kudzu, and they damage soybeans and kudzu primarily by feeding on the stems rather than the leaves. 

Gardner reported that kudzu biomass in infested stands is reduced by about one third within a year's time, which is probably good news for our roadsides. For soybean farmers, the average 18% reduction in crop yield is markedly less-than-good news. For urban areas, it may turn out that the worst problems relate to the stink and the staining caused by the little pests, and some people may have a localized allergic reaction to contact with the bugs. Hopefully, the picture will become even more clear this season, as more data are gathered and added to what we already know.

Bean Leaf Rollers - Late Summer Pests on Beans

The bean leaf rollers are late-summer pests that don't always show up in my Georgia garden, but they apparently are all over Florida, because most of the information about them is from research done there. The caterpillars grow up to become long tailed skippers - pretty little brown butterflies - which is part of the reason I'm going to let these live, as long as the damage doesn't become too extreme.

Below is one more video, this one about my favorite cowpeas. Not only are these Pigott Family Heirloom peas hilariously vigorous climbers, but they also are delicious. For the vegetarian crowd, these are great as the base for a vegetarian gravy as well as when they are prepared as just cooked beans to have with cornbread.

I enlisted one of my sons as a cameraman this morning to make these little videos for me. These are both totally unrehearsed and mostly unplanned, so they might seem a little random in spots, but Zack did a GREAT job of figuring out where to aim the camera as I spoke. It totally isn't his fault that I make weird faces when I'm talking.

Gardens and Talks

This week I spent a couple of hours at a community garden in Smyrna, and it was mostly doing very well. It was great to see so many little gardens, and to meet more people who are focused on growing good food!

However, the garden was definitely having a pest problem. I have never seen so many beetles-per-square-inch before; these are kudzu bugs, and they were all over the pole beans:

So far, there is no good, established control method for these beetles, since they are new to the United States. Scuttlebutt has it that some entomologists at UGA are looking into the effectiveness of a parasitic wasp, but that's really all I've heard so far. It is likely, though, that if next year gardeners grow their beans under row covers, they will be able to avoid (or at least delay) such dramatic infestation.

The garden's tomato plants also had a problem, and I'm pretty sure it is Septoria leaf spot. The good news is that most of the garden beds already have produced a lot of tomatoes for the gardeners, so they have enjoyed a good harvest up to now.

The garden/farm where I volunteer on Saturdays has the same disease problem, and I'm guessing that it's only a matter of time before the leaf spot hits my garden, too. Disease has been a huge problem for gardens all over the area this year. Gardeners who are not all that concerned about using organic methods have been keeping the manufacturer of Daconyl (a fungicide) in business this year, and the rest of us are muddling through as best we can.

I pulled out the last of my Cherokee Purple plants yesterday, but I have several other tomato plants still producing, so I'm not totally heartbroken. Joe says that the Tomato Man's Amish tomatoes taste better, which means we still have what Joe thinks of as a "highly desirable" variety providing tomatoes for us.

Later today I'll get to visit another community garden, this one out in the north-east corner of the county, and I will be talking some about getting ready for planting fall veggies and about pest and disease problems.

On the evening of July 31, I'm scheduled to talk at the county Extension office about getting ready for the fall veggie garden. Anyone who wants to come should call the office to sign up (770-528-4070; or email uge1067@uga.edu).

Planning Pays Off

Notice how there aren't any green beans in the most recent batch of harvested veggies?:

That's because the patch of beans I've been harvesting from so far looks terrible. I hope nobody else has quite this much trouble with those crazy Mexican bean beetles:

I harvested the last of the beans from the damaged patch, cutting the top growth off to add to the compost and digging the remainders back into the soil. The good news is that, having seen this kind of extensive damage before (year after year...), I planted a second patch of beans that is just about to start providing us with more beans:

We'll get a few more weeks of green beans before the beetles destroy this newer patch of plants, and I'll have another patch of beans coming up to replace these, too, if all goes as planned.

To be honest, I am surprised that there already are tiny beans on those plants, considering the recent extreme heat. Who would have thought that a variety of bush beans (Contender) could set beans on days with highs in the 100s? Most beans won't make in that kind of heat.

In the less-good-planning category, the Pigott cowpeas were planted a little too soon. They are coming up behind the cucumbers (which are on the trellis) and are growing fast enough that the cucumbers are in danger of being swallowed up.

If I were at home right now (I'm in South Texas, on a family visit), I would be starting seeds for my fall garden this weekend. For plants in the cabbage family, it's time! Instead, the seeds for this year's broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower are going to have to wait another week. At least, though, I have a plan!

Not an Avanlanche of Food, but Close Enough

This might be my best "zucchini year" ever. We have brought zucchini, sometimes two or three squashes at a time, to the kitchen almost every day for a few weeks now. Some of it went into the freezer this past weekend, and some went into the freezer the weekend before this one.

Our green beans have produced enough for current meals, but we have harvested more at the garden/farm where we volunteer on Saturday mornings. This weekend, we not only managed to get a lot of our own zucchini into the freezer, but my husband canned 16 pints of  green beans, we made a batch of blackberry jam, made a blackberry pie, and we put a couple of quarts of blueberries into the dehydrator. Not exactly an avalanche of food, but it was a very busy weekend!

The raspberries and blackberries in our yard are never quite so abundant as the blueberries, and they have passed their peak of production. However, the berries have really brightened up our breakfasts. Most of the blackberries that went into this past weekend's jam were from our Saturday work. The berries below are from our yard.

The peppers are doing pretty well, and the cucumbers are now producing "eatin' size" fruits.

The bad news is that the day-flying moths of the squash vine borers that I saw awhile back did exactly as expected; they laid eggs on my zucchini plants. The hole in the big petiole below is a sign that the eggs have hatched and the larvae already have bored into my plants. It is likely that, in a few days, I will need to pull these plants from the garden.

In the better-news category, the cucumbers are about to provide a lot more food. We had a cucumber salad tonight with our potato/zucchini soup, and if all goes well (I have heard some sad tales of downy mildew recently) we should have plenty of cucumber salads ahead of us.

Are We Sure this is Spring?

It's hard to take spring seriously when it is already looking so much like summer out in the garden. The zucchini have begun to make good-sized squashes, some of which have already made it onto the stove:

The first green beans will be coming in tomorrow:

And the peppers are already beginning to form. These, I think, are Spanish Spice:

These are Feherezon:

Is that not crazy? Elsewhere in the garden, the patch of onions that I planted from dry sets (little dry bulbs) all sent up flowering stalks before the plants even had a chance to make bulbs, so the harvest from that patch is not going to be what I had hoped for. In addition, the few good bulbs in the patch will need to be eaten fairly soon since they've been split by those flowering stalks.

The onions I planted from a little bunch of slender green starts made smaller-than-usual bulbs and then threw in the towel a week ago; the tops turned brown and fell over. Onions usually don't call it quits until the end of June. Everything I've read indicates that the alternating warm and cold weather is behind the early maturity, and the early flowering, of the two crops.

The garlic is finishing early, and strangely, too. The leaves are beginning to yellow, so I pulled a couple of bulbs to check on how the crop is coming along. This is what I got:

It's hard to imagine that these two garlic bulbs were growing within two feet of each other in the bed, but they were. They are different varieties, but the two shouldn't be so very different in size! I am guessing that the rest of the garlic harvest is going to be equally strange; however, I am going to wait until the tops are absolutely brown before pulling any more from the ground. I'd like give any remaining tinies the opportunity to get bigger!

In the good news column, the Yellow Marble cherry tomato has been busy making little tomatoes. There are lots of these on the one plant of this variety:

Most of my other tomato plants, all started in the house in mid-March, are flowering, and a few have tiny tomatoes on them. Their timing is just about right, based on the usual unfolding of the gardening year.

Since the zucchini are being nicely productive right now, I went ahead and poured a little fish-emulsion fertilizer on them, to keep them going. It would be a shame to risk letting the plants slow down this early in the season!

Also today I turned under the pea vines. The harvest from the peas this year wasn't great, but that is my own fault. It turns out that bunnies really like pea vines in their "bunny salad," so I brought pieces of the plants in to Moonpie (our momma rabbit) and her babies most days while the plants were trying to make peas. I'm pretty sure I would have had more peas if I hadn't kept harvesting pieces of the vines.

By Friday or Saturday, the vines will have decomposed enough that I will be able to replant that space. At this point, it's hard to know what to put there. Some of my crops are running about a month ahead of their usual schedule. Considering the strangeness of this year's weather and its effects on the garden so far, what will June and July be like? The answer, probably, is "continued craziness."

New Pest: Kudzu Bug

A new, tiny brown bug - the Kudzu Bug - showed up in my yard last week, but other yards in the Atlanta area have been host to this insect for a couple of years now. A large number of calls to the local county extension office over the past year have been about this particular pest.

It shares that unfortunate habit of ladybugs of overwintering inside the walls of buildings, leading to occasional outbreaks of "what the heck?" when great masses of them emerge inside the building instead of outside, where they belong.

The really bad news is that this is not a "good bug" like the ladybug, devouring aphids and other small garden pests. The kudzu bug is itself a pest, not only on kudzu, but on all plants in the bean & pea family. It eats their leaves.

UGA's Dr. John Ruberson has published a short Pest Report (click the link to read it) about this new pest in the newsletter of Georgia Organics.

For farmers, the bug is a big problem partly because effective controls haven't yet been established, even though the bug is causing some serious damage. I am hoping that, for gardeners, the insect (which is a true bug - a Hemipteran) is not as much of a pest as the Mexican Bean Beetle, but I may have to resign myself to battling yet another beetle that eats my bean plants.

So far, my bean-beetle battle strategy includes early planting of bush beans, which works because the Mexican Bean Beetles become much more abundant as summer progresses. Sometimes, I don't see them until July, and by then I can already have harvested quite a lot of beans from bush-type plants.

According to the short article by Dr. Ruberson, the Kudzu Bug is showing up much earlier in the gardening year, and the bug in my garden suggests that he is right. That means my strategy of planting early bush beans isn't going to help much in the effort to avoid damage caused by Kudzu Bugs.

My other main strategy is to knock adult beetles into soapy water to drown them. Smashing the adults has also worked for Mexican Bean Beetles, even though it is pretty messy, but I have heard that the Kudzu Bugs have stinky guts, which makes smashing a less attractive strategy.

I also smash Mexican Bean Beetle larvae and eggs, and this would probably also work for Kudzu Bugs, but the smashing strategy isn't nearly as effective as avoidance by earlier planting of early-maturing bush beans has been. Smashing and drowning the pests just delays by a week or two the time when the crop is a complete loss.

It looks as though this will be a very interesting gardening year. Wish me luck!

EDIT: I usually get my basic information right, but in this post I originally had called the kudzu bug a beetle, and it isn't. The kudzu bug is in the order Hemiptera; it's a true bug. The information should be all correct now!

19 April 2013 EDIT: Anyone who is interested enough in Kudzu Bugs to have read this far should probably read the Kudzu Bug Update from 8 April 2013.

The Crops Are Saved!

Along with "Trouble in the neighborhood!" (when he sees a police car), "The crops are saved!" is one of Joe's favorite catch-phrases. I hear that phrase most when it's finally raining after a long dry spell, so I've heard it some recently. In the last week, we've had almost four inches of rain.

We had a little hail with the first storm, but the damage in my yard was limited to holes in leaves and some leaves knocked off their plants. The storm wasn't too bad in my yard, but the hail that did fall ranged in size from the diameter of nickels to the diameter of quarters:



Plants in other yards had more damage. None of us like to go out and find our plant babies broken in two, but one friend walked out after the storm and found exactly that. It was pretty sad.

The same crops as last week (zucchini, green beans, and cucumbers) are being harvested in my yard. I did, though, dig up the potatoes. I got nearly 18 pounds out of the 4-by-4 foot patch. For Georgia, that's not too terrible. Some of these were roasted tonight to go with supper after being rolled in olive oil and sprinkled with fresh, chopped rosemary and some salt. We had zucchini (sauteed) and blackberry cobbler, too. Have I said yet how much I enjoy eating food that we grew and/or harvested ourselves?



The Provider bush beans have been interesting to harvest. They seem to have a very different production strategy than the Burpee Tenderpod bush beans that I usually grow. Provide puts out a huge burst of beans and then seems to taper off, while the Tenderpod have a slower, steadier pace of production over a long time. I've had Tenderpod plants produce most of the summer, but I don't think the Providers are going to keep going after this big flush of beans is gone.

The good news here is that the pole beans will be sending food to the table soon, so if the Provider plants really do quit, we will still have beans in the yard.

Leather Britches Beans

I finally spent a half hour looking into leather britches beans, and I found out a lot in just that little bit of time.

For people who don't already know, leather britches is really a preservation/cooking method for green beans. Mature beans are threaded onto strings to dry, and later cooked, usually with some kind of pork for seasoning (I don't eat any kind of pork, but I'm working on this one step at a time). This is a very "old-timey" way of preserving beans for use in the winter.

I had heard that any kind of green bean can be used for making these, but my experience with the beans in my yard had made me think that some varieties of beans would work better than others. Basically, Burpee's Tenderpod, which is a great green bean for fresh eating, shrivels to almost non-existence in drying, and the flavor is dramatically less than great. After reading my new book "The Resilient Gardener" by Carol Deppe, who found that some squash varieties were better than others for drying, I knew I would have to do some actual work to figure this out.

The writer over at vegetablesofinterest.typepad.com confirmed that thought:

The hulls of today's beans all become very tough as the bean matures. Some gardeners will dry a commercial string bean as a substitute for 'old time' Leather Britches beans but they risk criticism from historians, Southern chefs and anyone who has tasted the real thing.

It turns out that more than one gardener recommends "greasy beans," especially the "greasy cut shorts," for this use. Steve from Western North Carolina, posting at newsgroups.derkeiler.com, said:

There are at least 3 different greasy beans grown by seed savers in Western NC. All are pole beans and strong runners. The Greasy Cut short has only 4-6 beans to the pod, so they're just strung and broken in 1/2. The long greasy (my type) has 8-11 beans per pod and then there is the big greasy. It has 8-11 beans and a very thick, fleshy pod.

I like to let the long greasy get very full before picking. The beans have a rich, nutty flavor and are wonderful for canning. The cut shorts make the best "leather britches".

At the site community.berea.edu is this comment:

"Black greasy" beans were a popular old-fashioned variety. They could be eaten fresh out of the garden or canned. When strung and dried, they were called "leather britches" or "shucky" beans.

A poster on the gardenweb forums agreed with the above comments:

Until her demise my adoptive granny, Sarah Lou Back, made leather britches every year. Her bean of choice was Greasy Grits, and there were so many strings of them hanging from her porch you couldn't see through what superficially looked like a bamboo curtain.

The writer at vegetablesofinterest.typepd.com added some other bean varieties to the leather britches list:

By general acclaim the best heirloom bean varieties to make Leather Britches include the Barnes Mountain Cornfield Bean, Pink Tip Greasy Bean, Tobacco Worm Bean and the NT Half Runner Bean.

Other writers added white half-runners to the list of good varieties for leather britches, and it sounds as though any bean described as a "shucky bean" is also a good candidate.

The writer at vegetablesofinterest included one more piece of very useful information in his post, the name and URL for a source of heirloom beans: Bill Best's Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center Inc.'s catalogue. Since this is the season for planning, I will be looking more closely at this particular catalogue.

Mexican Bean Beetles

Every year brings its own trials. This year, the Mexican bean beetles have been ferocious. At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, we tried spraying with Neem, but that didn't seem to bother the beetles at all. At home, I've just been smashing them, one beetle (or larva) at a time, but the beetles are winning. This is what most of the leaves on my pole beans look like:



And this is the adult form of the critter that is turning the bean leaves into lace:



The adult beetle looks enough like a ladybug (it is even in the ladybug family!) that most people would think it's a good guy. They would be wrong.

When the beetles are mature, they lay eggs, clusters of yellow dots. At some point, these eggs will hatch.



When the eggs hatch, what comes out doesn't look at all like a beetle. It is a fuzzy yellow larva. The larval stage of this beetle is heck on the leaves of bean plants. When I was looking for larvae to photograph, I couldn't find any young ones. These (below) have gone, I think, into the pupa stage.



When the pupa completes its development, it breaks out of its husk (like cicadas do) in the more familiar beetle form. There is an empty husk on the upper leaf in the picture below.



The big question is what to do about all these beetles. I am thinking about pulling up all the pole bean plants, but I still have cowpeas growing in another part of the garden. I am concerned that, without the pole beans around, those cowpeas will look a lot more tasty; right now, the cowpeas are bean-beetle free.

I have read that adult beetles overwinter in leaf litter, so I am definitely going to be turning the garden's soil some this winter, to make sure that remaining adults are exposed to whatever cold we have this year--- but last year we had a very cold winter; I am not sure how so many beetles survived!

Rust in the Garden

One of the great things about working at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, besides getting to hang out with a cool bunch of gardeners, is that it adds a lot to my gardening experience. This week, it added "bean rust" to the list of plant diseases with which I am now familiar.

This is what bean rust looks like on the top of a leaf:



And this is what it looks like on the underside of a leaf:



This bean variety is State Half Runner. The poor plants were already beset with Mexican bean beetles, but this is, potentially, worse.

I had brought my copy of Ellis and Bradley's Organic Gardeners Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control with me on Wednesday morning (our usual work time) to look up what was wrong with our cucumbers (another post...). It definitely came in handy! Photos on page 34 made the problem easy to identify, and this is what the book says:

As this fungal disease progresses, leaves turn yellow and drop. Spots also appear on pods and stems. . . Rust usually develops in late summer. To control, spray sulfur as soon as you see indications of the disease. Plant cultivars that are rust-tolerant, such as 'Burpee Stringless,' 'Kentucky Wonder,' 'Roma,' 'Spurt,' and 'Sungold,' to prevent problems.

After reading this, we looked up sulfur in the index, to learn more:

Sulfur is probably the most commonly used organic fungicide, although plain sulfur is more a protective measure than a control. Sulfur doesn't kill fungal spores, but it does prevent them from germinating on the plant surface. Another useful control is lime-sulfur, which can kill recently germinated disease spores. (page 348)

And then we found this:

A severe limitation to the use of sulfur is the foliar damage it causes in hot weather. (page 369)

In essence, we have a problem. If the rust progresses - and in this hot weather it will - the plants could lose all their leaves, which would definitely impair production. If we use a sulfur spray, the leaves could become damaged in this hot weather, which would impair the plants' production. It's almost one of those "danged if you do and danged if you don't" situations. Our fearless leader, however, has decided to try the sulfur.