Cleaning up Summer

Over Veteran's Day my wife lovingly provided me with the time to clean up my summer garden and harvest my sweet potatoes. The crop experienced a light frost a couple days beforehand and I reasoned that I would not have any time between then and when a hard frost came to spend cleaning up my summer garden.



My Summer Garden Back in August



A light frost and time off provides clean-up opportunities



My 2012 Summer Garden has come to an end

Due to the extent of the vine growth, most of my time was spent cutting back Purple Hyacinth Bean and Sweet Potato foliage.



A few of the composted vines - my wife humored me in taking this picture


It is difficult to see the end of a season, though, especially in warmer climates – the death of plants in one season means the life of plants in the new season.

~With this thought I say goodbye to summer and hello to winter!~

Cooking Purple Hyacinth Beans

Though my family has enjoyed the bountiful harvest of Purple Hyacinth Beans I have stir-fried, they really prefer the English beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) such as “Blue Lake” that you buy fresh, frozen, or canned from the store. The cooking method to make the Purple Hyacinth Bean (Lablab purpureus) taste like an English-type bean is the same as the method I use for Chinese Long Beans, though the Hyacinth beans must be cooked for a shorter amount of time. In short, I blanch them.



Purple Hyacinth Beans Ready to Cook



Blanching requires bringing a pot of water to a rolling boil and making the water very briny with a generous amount of salt (at least ¼ cup of salt per 2 quarts of water).  



Add plenty of salt to the boiling water



Once you have the beans ready and the water boiling, set the timer for 3 minutes and dump in the beans.

Stir the beans after 2 minutes just to make sure both sides of all beans are blanched.

Beans should turn a green color, as shown below.

Most - but not all - beans will turn some shade of green

Finally out the beans using a colander and serve with butter or eat plain.



Not so purple Hyacinth Beans ready to eat



While some people may scoff at the idea of losing so many minerals in the water or having to prepare so much to blanch the beans, I feel blanching the beans is time well spent to have my children enjoy eating their veggies.

The Negected Garden

Due to recent events beyond my control I have been having a difficult time caring for my garden. It seems to have done alright without me despite how much I miss working in it.



My neglected Monsoon Garden


A few of the things that have kept me away from my garden which include a neighbor on drugs smashing up my car, dealing with insurance – which paid me much less than the car was worth, finding a car, buying a car, having to return the car, buying another car, doing emissions and registration, doing some repairs on that car, accidently locking myself out of that car, going to the Toyota dealership for new keys, having to appear in court multiple times for the neighbor incident, having to deal with a prosecutor, breaking my big toe while exercising, going to the hospital because the pain would not decrease, organizing a church activity, taking care of children with pink eye and strep throat, disinfecting our house and having to go to the doctor for a rapid strep throat test and an antibiotic eye drop prescription. All of this happened while starting off a new school year for my children and for myself as a teacher.


Alas - the weeds outside my garden (in the foreground) are growing!



 I love to garden and I love to share my garden with others, though you will have to forgive me for my infrequent posts while I recuperate from the last month of my life.



Despite neglect, my garden is growing - howbeit a bit unruly



Purple Hyacinth Bean

My initial encounter with the Purple Hyacinth Bean (Lablab purpureus) came while doing some research into heat tolerant beans online. Supposedly, Thomas Jefferson happened to have this plant as a flower within his garden. I later read more about this bean variety in the  book Perennial Vegetables and decided it was worth a try.

One of my Purple Hyacinth Bean plants after about 3-4 weeks

My experience with growing the Purple Hyacinth Bean is that it can be a little difficult to start. Going through the effort of chitting the seed (pre-sprouting it before planting it in the soil) is well worth the effort and results in an improved plant emergence rate than putting dry seeds in the soil. When planted in the spring (highs in the 80s and lows in the 60s) the plant grows slowly.



The Purple Hyacinth Bean Blossom is pink or purple

Another thing I have noticed about these beans is that they are extremely heat resistant (with local temperatures exceeding 107 degrees Fahrenheit). The Hyacinth Bean requires an average amount of water and doesn’t experience much pest problem though insects will occasionally chew a little on the leaves. I have my beans trellised over a metal shed – something I would never do with cucumbers or Chinese long beans. This occasionally causes the plant to get a little burnt but generally the plant just keeps growing. I did experience a little bit of bean mosaic earlier in the season but that quickly disappeared after I removed the infected leaves and pulled out my Tepary Beans.


From the top of my metal shed temperatures exceed 107 F

The pink flowers of the Purple Hyacinth Bean have not attracted near as many insects as I initially thought they would, though bees and butterflies occasionally visit.

Purple Hyacinth Bean Pods developing on the vine



The Purple Hyacinth Bean plant can produce quite a lot of beans



One of the reasons why I enjoy growing these beans is because of the color. The beans beautifully contrast the leaves of the plant, as well as the rest of the garden.



A week's worth of hyacinth beans



Purple Hyacinth Bean Pods are almost ready to cook.

 
How a vegetable tastes is one very important question that many books and websites often leave unanswered. Some, including my family members, who are used to the taste of English-type blue lake bush beans would probably not go for Chinese long beans unless cooked a specific way. So, how do Purple Hyacinth Beans taste? I tried them both raw and cooked to find out. I have read in multiple places that the skins of the mature seeds are poisonous so I decided not to even try cooking them. Eaten raw, the young beans are okay. They taste a little like eating some kind of thick leaf. Although the pods unfortunately lose their purple color when they are stir fried the change of color is more than compensated by a dramatic improvement in taste. The closest thing I could relate the taste of the cooked bean pods is to edamame or soybean pods. My children do not hesitate to tell me if they don’t like the taste of our home-grown produce and they asked for seconds of these beans.


Although the beans change color they taste really good!



In summary, other than the dry seeds being poisonous, I would highly recommend Purple Hyacinth Beans to anyone with room to trellis a vine with beautiful flowers and pods. The vine is low–maintenance, takes the heat well and the bean pods taste great when cooked. There are apparently many other hyacinth bean cultivars that I hope to be able to grow in the future.

 

A few seeds ready to plant straight from a dried pod.




Tepary Bean Review



Tepary Bean Plant with small flowers

Though I usually have a lot of good to say about the veggies I grow I had mixed emotions when I recently harvested my tepary beans. These beans were obtained through the Pima County’s Seed Library. The package they were in was only labeled only as “tepary beans grown in Tucson” and had no reference to what particular cultivar of tepary bean they were. Their bushing habit would definitely enable them to support each other if grown in an open area.

One positive thing I have to say about this variety is that it took the heat very well and was well adapted to my climate. Tepary beans are native to the Sonoran desert, so I wasn’t too surprised by that. Another positive trait was that the plants produced a nice crop of beans given the lack of space and time I provided for them to grow. Only a few small plants grew in a limited space with partial sun.

So – why did I pull them out? One of the traits of the tepary bean is that it can carry common bean mosaic virus without significantly affecting the tepary bean. Unfortunately, this virus affected my pink-eyed purple podded beans – which did not have mosaic until the tepary bean plants grew larger. My tolerance for disease in my garden is zero. This means that the beans were removed, pods and all, along with other infected plants and all bean debris was promptly deposited in the trash. If I lived in a rural area I would have just burned it.

Tepary Bean pods do not work well as a snap bean

Another negative side to this bean is that they are primarily useful as a dry bean. This is because the beans do not grow large enough to eat until the seeds in them are large enough to harvest.

I saved the majority of the seeds for the seed library – something that is part of the deal of “borrowing” seeds is that you bring more back. However, due to the fact that the majority of the legumes I grow are susceptible to bean mosaic I will most likely never grow this variety again.

Isolating Beans



Tepary Bean Plants are native to the Southwest.

Because I am still experimenting and learning about many of the vegetable varieties that are out there I want to keep the seed of each variety I grow, without having them cross-pollinate with other varieties. In order to do this, I must isolate each cultivar (or specific vegetable variety) from others in the same family. For example: I do not want to grow a red lettuce that tasted wonderful next to a green lettuce that tasted awful and have them cross-pollinate to create something in-between. I might get a good tasting green lettuce or I could end up with a bad tasting purple lettuce. Either way, I have no intention to devote my efforts to breeding lettuce until I know what type of lettuce grows best in my climate and what type of lettuce my family enjoys eating the most.

A gardener can isolate his plants in many different ways. My least favorite method of isolation is using distance to keep one variety from another. If I wanted to keep seed of two different types of corn I would have to separate them by at least a mile to keep them from cross-pollinating. I do not have miles of garden to work with (though I wish I did) so instead I try to isolate my plants by only growing one variety of each plant family per season. I do have some exceptions to growing more than one family of plants in separate seasons.



Purple Podded Pinkeye - No pods yet.



Two of the exceptions I have to growing multiple plants in the same family include if I’m trialing the plant and I don’t need to keep seed or if I’m dealing with a family of plants that rarely cross-pollinate (i.e. tomatoes). Another exception involves how I pollinate my peppers. I hand pollinate them with a paintbrush early in the season when I see very few pollinators. Then I only save seed from the earlier peppers, being mindful to clearly label each variety to keep them separated.

To isolate my beans I have chosen to grow different species of bean rather than isolate them in any other manner. I am currently growing three different kinds of beans – Southern peas, purple hyacinth beans, and tepary beans. The southern pea variety (cultivar: Purple Podded Pinkeye) is from the family Vigna unguiculata, while the purple hyacinth bean is from the Dolichos lablab family, and finally my Tepary beans (unknown cultivar borrowed from the library) is from the Phaseolus acutifolius family.



Bushy Tepary Beans - I take pictures at night because of the daytime heat


I knew that my southern peas were bush beans and my Hyacinth beans were vine beans and I thought that my Tepary beans were probably a vining variety too. However, as you can see, my Tepary beans are currently more bushy than vining. As far as I know, all three of these bean families have a vining and a bush equivalent - meaning that you can either grow them up a trellis or you can keep them low near the ground, depending upon your gardening needs.

Growing different families of beans enables me to notice the positive and negative features of each family of beans. For example, the southern peas (Vigna unguiculata) often attract ants to take part in a mutalisitic relationship. The beans produce nectar sources near the flower pods, called extrafloral nectaries. As payment, the ants act as a beneficial insect on the beans, keeping off any bug that might consider the bean as a meal. One drawback to this is that every time I harvest these kind of beans that I’ll be sure to harvest some ants with the beans.

Purple Hyacinth beans named after their purple pods - none here yet.

What I know about Tepary beans is that they are incredibly drought and heat resistant while Purple Hyacinth beans produce flowers which really attract pollinators. And pollinators are exactly what I need for some of my vegetables pollinate - as long as they are the same variety. There are so many bean varieties that, if you do have a lot of pollinators in your area, you may find it advantageous to grow different families to keep your favorite varieties pure.

Does Soil Inoculant really work?

When I have problems with digestion I often benefit from eating yogurt that contains the Acidophilus bacteria. There are products that can help a plant’s roots, like yogurt can help a person’s stomach. These products are often made out of nitrogen-fixing bacteria (rhizomes) and are touted as helping legumes get good head-start. Products in this class are often loosely referred to as “soil inoculants”.

Yogurt contains beneficial bacteria.

At first I thought that rhizomic soil inoculant was some kind of propaganda marketed by gardening companies to lure gullible gardeners into spending more money on their products. However, a recent experience has taught me otherwise. A while ago I had been given a gift certificate from a family member to a large seed company. I could not find too many open-pollinated seeds in their catalogue so I chose to add soil inoculant to my purchase. I didn’t think the inoculant did too much the first time I tried it and I had nothing to compare it to. In hindsight though, my first crop of peas was better than any other crop I have had since.

Soil Inoculant contains beneficial bacteria.

I have been growing Chinese Long Beans the last few years and have noticed that they often take a while to sprout. Recently I tried soaking my Chinese Long Beans overnight, then draining the water and rolling the seeds in soil inoculant. Within a few days half of the seeds began sprouting. They continued to sprout again and again. I have never seen such high germination in this seed variety and can only attribute it to the soil inoculant. Since then the beans have continued to grow at an accelerated rate in comparison with growing them in years past. I don’t believe that using soil inoculant for legumes is the only thing legumes need, though I do believe the inoculant helps germination rates, increase plant vigor, and speed up the time between sowing bean seeds and reaping a crop.

Step 1: Soak Beans overnight

Step 2: Put soil inoculant in a container.

Step 3: Rinse out beans

Step 4: Mix inoculant with beans

Step 5: Plant beans with inoculant

Step 6: Watch your plants grow!

There are a variety of soil inoculants out there and I cannot speak to the effectiveness of any other variety than the one I used. Some have a few good bacteria varieties while others contain a host of beneficial organisms. One farmer even conducted an unbiased comparison of the affect of using inoculants (and some other things) in his soil. Given my recent success with soil inoculant I will definitely consider investing in these bacteria in the future.

Cooking Chinese Long or Asparagus Beans



Chinese Long Beans on a Platter



You may not mind the “overcooked asparagus” taste produced while steaming them or the hard slippery texture of the skins when sautéing, but as for me I prefer a taste similar to the New England varieties of green beans bought from the store. In order to achieve this palatable taste and texture you must blanch the beans. To do so, start with a big pot of water with the water boiling. Pour in a generous helping of salt (at least ¼ cup per gallon). Once the salt has dissolved in the water, dump the uncut beans in the water and cover for 5 minutes. No more, no less. They should now be very dark green and tender, but not too soft. Use a colander to drain saltwater brine from the beans and immediately rinse with cold water or soak in ice water until beans return to room temperature. Then cut the beans. You can then add some butter in a pan and stir them around until the butter melts or you can just freeze them in bags for later use.

Chinese Long Beans



Chinese Long Beans are very prolific

There are quite a few beans that can really take the heat, but there are not a whole lot that can take the heat, are not eaten by lace bugs, and are very disease resistant. Enter the Chinese Long Bean, or Asparagus Bean. This native of Asia is resistant to most anything thrown at it. There do seem to be some forms of rust it can contract and the same weevil that bores through mesquite pods will also attack these beans. Otherwise you are looking at a constant supply of beans able to pump out enough beans to feed 1 person on 2-3 feet of 6’ tall bean plants. Though this bean can cross-pollinate with the black-eyed pea, or cowpea, the method of pollination I see most is from ants visiting the flowers. The beans secrete a nectar that attracts the ants who either protect the beans, pollinate the beans or both. You can expect to have to shake off a couple ants during bean harvest. Expect to have to harvest every 2-3 days. I judge when I need to harvest based on the thickness of the bean. About the thickness of a #2 pencil is just right. In short, the asparagus bean is a disease resistant and heat loving bean that produces heavily, but requires some extra work in one specific area. This area is the most important part for those who grow for food– figuring out how to cook them! After several years of asking around and researching I finally figured out  - and it was well worth it!

Chinese Long Beans Take over even in 110 degree temperatures