Despite the very spotty germination on my Kentucky Wonder green bean plants that resulted in exactly nine plants growing to maturity this year, I have actually been harvesting green beans. I have two gallon-sized bags of green beans in the freezer right now, thus ensuring my favorite green beans+bacon+onions for Thanksgiving dinner.
Of course, given the fact that I never did put up fencing for the plants to climb, I also have a lot of beans that get lost in the jungle and grow too much before I harvest them. This makes them tough and starchy. Not what I want to a green bean to be.
But it IS what I want a soup bean to be.
"Soup beans" are what I call those green beans that over-mature on the plant before I find them. Some of those over-mature ones I leave to dry out, and then I save them to plant for next year. But most of them, I freeze as soup beans.
It takes me a few days to harvest enough beans to bother with, but when I do have enough, I go through them and separate them into green beans and soup beans based on their size. All of them get the stem ends snapped off. The green beans are frozen whole. The soup beans are chopped into short lengths before being frozen.
3 comments:
I have to admit, I can't tell the difference between those beans. However, glad your gardening efforts paid off!
Yeah, it's sort of hard to see in the photo. You can definitely feel how large the beans inside are, though, in the soup beans.
Kentucky Wonder are my very favorite beans, but they just won't grow in Maryland (they grew great in Michigan). We've had to substitute bush beans, which aren't as good. But I guess whatever will grow where you are, is good.
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