Green Things

I bit the bullet and hauled in all the remaining fruit in the garden last night, because temperatures were predicted to drop near to freezing.  (Our average first-frost night is a month away -- another side effect of global warming or natural variation?)

I haven't written much about the cucumbers or beans.  The cukes have been a veritable embarrassment of riches -- we've had two or three gigantic slicing or burpless (or both) cucumbers every week since July.  Aside from the bounty (glut?) on the tray here, we have three foot-long ones in the fridge, and last weekend gave another three that long to a friend who loves them as much as we do. (For size, the tray is 18'' across by 12" deep. I've got to start putting size comparisons in photos of produce.)

Also in the photo are some of the heirloom Scarlet Empress beans (one almost a foot long is snaking up from the lower right corner).  This plant was a throw-in-the-cart addition, simply to fill a corner with something pretty -- they have a delicate red blossom all over a robust heart-shaped leaf vine. I was disappointed in the harvest -- finding one bean, literally, before late August, when friends J & S came to plunder our early tomatoes.  J wandered off, and some minutes later I found him plucking handfuls of beans off the vine -- I just hadn't cued in to look for a bean-y shape amongst the leaves.  Turns out, the vine drips with beans, many more than we two in the house can eat.

The beans taste best, as green beans, when they are about 5 inches long. Beans this long in the grocery store would be stringy and chewy, but these are the flavor of Green, of Summer.  Shorter than that, and they are flour-y, unready, longer and they've started to produce bean-seeds (I don't know what else to call them).  The bean-seeds are a pretty pink color, and taste like fresh fava beans (which I like), except they have a slightly bitter shell over them which is a pain to peel off.  I've read that, dried, they taste excellent, too, but I haven't dried any yet.

I also picked all the tomatoes left outside (except for entirely forgetting the two plants in the front -- as compared to the side -- yard, the Celebrity and the Oregon Extra Early plants).  Another 34 heirlooms (I didn't bother to work out how many were Robesons and how many Brandywines) and 33 Bloody Butchers, a mere two dozen Romas and I didn't bother to count the cherries (I didn't pick all the cherries, either, just the ones that had started to ripen).  They are now laid out on a counter in the basement, underneath a full-spectrum light. I'm curious to see if they ripen better off the vine with the light than they were doing on the vine in fading light.