The bean harvest continues.

The weather has been lovely this weekend. We’ve been able to harvest more string beans and the first crop of dried beans. The string beans are one of our favorite mixed color string beans. The seed packet contains green, yellow and purple string beans. They’re so beautiful, but even better, they taste wonderful. The purple beans become green once they’re cooked. So far, we’ve harvest nearly 15 pounds of string beans from this bed. (I’ll post the seed packet information for all of our summer crops in another post.)

The crop of dried beans that were ready first are called Tiger’s Eye. You know a dried bean is ready to harvest when it rattles inside the pod. Beans that you’ve dried yourself taste so much better than those you get from the store. Store-bought beans are often several years old and have lost much of their flavor.

Welcome!

A variety of veggies from the 2011 summer harvest.

July 9, 2012:
The gardens at Yellow Tree Farms have been quite active this year.

It’s already summer and I’m just now beginning the blog. I’ll try to cover some background to get started.

We started in mid March by planting potatoes. These were grocery store spuds set aside to sprout. By mid April we had planted the squash bed, crib and the front bean bed. Then came the decision to terrace the back slope. All planting ceased until the terracing was finished. By the time the construction ended, one month later, we had missed the prime planting season. As a result of the delay, the bulk of the tomatoes, beans and melons got in the ground late. At least we have good weather until mid to late fall. We’ll keep our fingers crossed. We also missed any chance of getting in corn, but the terraces will give us enough room for corn next year.