In The Box: 7, Local
One drought and three floods later, the gardens here are pretty much reeling. The pumpkins and hard squash are all coming out now, so they won’t rot sitting on top of the soggy soil. The tomatoes are finished, pummeled by thunderstorms. Ditto the cucumbers. Salad mix and spinach, planted in time to be harvested a few weeks ago, still stand stunted in water. Potatoes, all mush. But the one very bright green spot in this whole crazy season is BEANS.
I’m so thankful now that we planted a ton of beans in the spring and late summer. My back garden, the one next to the pigs’, is waist deep full of mature and maturing soybeans for edamame. If you haven’t enjoyed these before, you are in for a great treat, and below you’ll find directions on how to prepare them. This salty Japanese treat is my family’s most anticipated garden harvest.
The front garden is overrun, in the best sense, with Kentucky Blue pole beans. From the back of my house, all I can see of the garden is fences completely covered in riotous vines. The dark emerald beanstalks obscure all the blackened tomatoes, all the yellowed squash, all the weeds.
Picking beans is a task my children assign to the tedious chore category, right up there with picking peas. The problem is that the pods are the same color as the plants and it’s really hard to know when you’ve got them all. And by all, I mean all the ones that are ready, because the beans and peas on a vine don’t all mature at the same time. Hence, they’ve got to be picked every day. If you skip a day, you’ll find lots of over-full beans or peas that have gone past sweet to starchy. Oh, and you can’t pick them in the cool of the morning, because if you disturb the dewy wet plants you can promote and spread disease and fungus.
Nevermind the negatives, bean-picking has been the height of my days since they started sizing up. The vines are so strong, so mighty, so happy to live in spite of the punishing weather, that just walking among them and rustling their leaves is a welcome antidote to the weak and floppy plants elsewhere in the gardens. And by walking, I mean standing up, walking! Unlike the bush beans and snap peas we grew earlier in the season, these want to run to six or seven feet, so you can harvest them without bending. They cling so tightly to the hog-panel fencing that I can snap the pods right off the vines without supporting the branches with my other hand. I can pick two-fisted! Eaten raw right out in the sun, they break between the teeth with a satisfying crisp snap.
Here’s what’s in the box:
In The Box; 7, Local Delivery, August 31, 2007
Flat-Pod Green Beans – Kentucky Blue pole beans with long skinny pods.
Edamame – These soybeans are a different variety from the feed-grade ones you see contour-cropped with corn across the Midwest. Where feed soy is harvested dry, these are harvested while still green, and boiled in the pod. When you are ready to eat them, pick a few cups of pods off the plants, and rinse. Fill a large saucepot with water, and add two tablespoons of salt, and bring to a boil. You read right, you want a lot of salt. These beans are served as bar food in Japan. Boil them in the salted water for about 10 minutes, drain, and eat as warm as you like. Just squeeze the beans out of the pods in to your mouth. Yummy!
Moon and Stars Watermelon – This heirloom variety should be green with yellow spots of varying sizes. The vines are spotted, but the melons turned out solid! We hope those we picked for you are ripe. Some are, some aren’t, but they can’t sit on the wet ground any longer without rotting.
Hard Squash – I do love hard squash in soups and stews. Any you don’t use now can be cooked, pureed and frozen to use as soup base later in the fall. What we have picked are dark Acorns, colorful round Carnivals, and slender Delicatas.
Squash Blossoms
Tomatoes – The last of the heirlooms, but at last we’ve got Green Zebras, my favorite. These are ripe when they are yellow and green striped.
Basil – Just beautiful, this herb is doing great in the gardens, and we can expect more of it still. Make pesto!!! Freeze pesto! Here’s our family’s recipe:
Pesto
Basil
Garlic
Pine Nuts or Walnuts
Olive Oil – Good quality!
Salt
That’s really all we use in our pesto, and we just make it to taste. The basic technique is to put a half cup of olive oil in a blender, press two garlic cloves into the oil, and then fill the blender half-full with basil leaves. We pick the leaves off and discard the stems. Blend. Then we add another cup or so of olive oil, about 1/3 cup of nuts, a few dashes of salt, and more leaves until the blender is pretty much full. Blend. This continues until the whole thing is smooth, green and creamy. Serve on pasta, squash, bread, crackers. Freeze what you don’t use immediately, as pesto will turn black within an hour if not frozen.
Bunching Onions – These are full-grown scallions, still mild but with a more leek-like texture.
Radish – Tender crisp and mild.
Cucumbers – The last harvest of these miniature white and green cukes.
Purple Kohlrabi – These were sizing up so nice for a fall harvest, but they are too wet to keep growing.
Chocolate Mint
Nasturtium Leaves and Flowers
Herbs: Parsley
Goat Cheese
