Some people seem to get pretty excited about Horticulture beans. And some people say...'horticulture beans?" I personally try to keep an open mind about them. The beans. They're not something I grew up with. I probably never saw them and certainly never ate them as a child. But as I was eating a bowl of horticulture beans last night and ruminating about them, I realized that, really, they're just white beans - only bigger. And maybe with a different texture...creamier. But maybe, like fresh red beans, you don't really get to know a bean until you've eaten it right out of the garden, freshly shelled and not yet processed; cooked that very same day.
Horticulture beans seem to 'make' first of all the beans in the garden. If we're lazy, we don't get to them in time. This year, we were right on top of it.
The minute they started to get pink and white, most of them anyway, we alerted folks that they were 'in' and pulled the plants on Saturday.
We sat out under a tree and pulled all the beans off the plants. This is what was left:
Now in baskets, we'll sell some,
but we'll make sure to shell, blanch and freeze, and dry some.Will's not crazy about my drying beans, but the ones (and there are always some) that are already dried on the plant or in the process of drying out we put aside, saving only the freshest ones for sale. So I take those and just finish off what they were doing anyway. 
Will says dried beans are a 'dime a dozen' and he's right, 
but organic dried beans are not. And OUR organic dried beans are certainly not! There are plenty enough to do both.The only picture I don't have is the one of the wasted bean row; Will did a lot of tilling yesterday evening, but I don't think he got to that row: It's a sad sight, the raggedy torn-up place where a beautiful row once stood. But, as soon as it is tilled it takes on a new character. A beginning rather than an end.
No comments:
Post a Comment