Beans

Yard-long beans, greasy-cut beans, Italian Romano beans, and French filet pole beans have been on the menu for weeks, but the supply finally overwhelmed our ability to eat them in a timely fashion.

So, it was time to start blanching them to freeze, and this nice assortment has ended up as freezer packages ( hmm, but more beans are coming).

Bean harvest

I roasted some red 'Pizza' peppers, too, and froze them. This has been a year for early ripening of abundant peppers as well as an unusual number of tomatillos so far, with more to come. They're often a no-show harvest for me. I've already harvested a gallon-size bag of them (now roasted and frozen).

The tomatoes are slowing down, except for the small plum tomatoes and the cherries.

And I sowed some early beets, kale, arugula, spinach, and cilantro this afternoon. It's always a bit of a juggle between warm season and cool season veggies. In this case, I pulled out a lavender that was in decline due to the warm wet summer, along with some accompanying thymes, so had some 'new' space to plant. But I've also pulled out some spent tomatoes in the lower bed, so it'll be ready for greens, too, as are the beds back in the Piedmont.

It's amazing how productive these small beds in the mountains are, although admittedly I've expanded the original raised beds to include a number of border beds between us and our neighboring apartment. (These have been flourishing with beans and squash.)

 

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The first beans, tomatoes, and squash

I was a bit late in planting some of the summer vegetables, but they've flourished in the initially cool late spring and now hot early summer temperatures.

Remarkably, I've harvested peppers and tomatilllos, usually a no-show until late summer.

There are LOTS of tomatoes developing and the first ones close to harvesting.  Woo-hoo!  And the various vining squashes are looking good, too -- no sign of squash vine borer moths or larvae (maybe they were confused by the strange winter and spring weather and somehow my plants will escape???)

This year, I do have mostly C. moschata squash varieties (trombocino & tatume) as well as butternut, and delicata), which are resistant to the borers, anyway, so maybe we'll have some squash this year!

Supposedly most winter squash like butternut and delicate are tasty enough as immature squash.  We'll see.  Apparently almost all squash aside from ornamental gourds (which are bitter) are at least decent-tasting, based on my limited Google search.

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