Mid-Season Bean Report

Okay. It is now mid-summer and the gardens are in full swing. I rode over to the community garden to take a look. Here is what I found.

My Rattlesnake pole beans are amazing; prolific and delicious. They are probably my favourite bean this year. The Northeasters are confusing; flat, yellow beans except for one plant that bears long flat green beans. They're all very good but... I actually didn't expect them to be yellow. And what's with that green one?

The Tongue of Fire are obviously pole beans. They were sold to me as bush beans and that's how I planted them in both gardens... so they're a bit of a mess, twining and sprawling around. They are not particularly prolific. Additionally, they are apparently extremely attractive to bugs. They have sustained more damage than any of my other beans. We've eaten a bunch of them both as snap and as shelly beans; they're nice enough but not quite as special as I'd hoped.

My tomatoes are all over the ground, due to mismanagement. However, they are starting to ripen up nicely and we've been eating quite a lot of them. The Persimmon variety is fantastically sweet and lovely. The Brandywines are misshapen but delicious. I don't think I'll grow the "Heart" variety again; they are humongous but slow to ripen. I have a couple of mystery plants in there that are producing tomatoes of dubious quality; one appears to be some kind of Roma and I know I didn't plant any of those deliberately. Sigh...

In Karen's garden:

The Thibodeau de Compte Beauce are growing well and are very prolific and quite lovely. They look like a slightly heavy Rattlesnake bean. I'm growing them for dry beans which is good because their pods seem very tough. The Jacob's Cattle are also growing very well. They are reasonably prolific and seem untroubled by bugs. My soybeans look good and seem to be quite prolific. I want to eat some of them as edamame, but I'm not sure I can get out to Karen's to pick them at the right time for that. They were still flowering and had only tiny beans when I went out last week to weed and look at everything. It was kind of thrilling to see all the different beans hanging down from their respective plants.

I'm enjoying the gardens, even though they are more work than I can keep up with. Because of this, I think I'll try to do the community garden again next year. The dry bean garden is an hours drive from here, so not really feasible to maintain. I don't know what kind of yield I'll get from it but I can't really imagine that it will be cost-effective. Still, it will be nice to have some different beans for baking this winter, even if we don't get a lot of them.