Boy, howdy! What a harvest from our bush beans this season! We pulled over 6 pounds of beans from just 48 plants. (And we even stole quite a few for side dishes over the last week or so!) We’re not keeping records, but this one just feels like a record.
If you recall, one of the major changes we made with bush beans this year was to sow them indoors about three weeks to our last frost. As expected, this pushed our harvest time up nearly a month as we usually have to wait until the end of the season when doing direct sows. This allows the bulk of the maturation to occur in our warmest month, July, which they obviously appreciated.
If you were with us last season, you might recall that we had an absolutely dismal bush bean harvest last year. It was largely due to weather and a very cool season, we didn’t even get enough for a single meal! But it did inspire us to finally start sowing them indoors, which has obviously contributed to earlier, heavier harvests.
Also, we were talking about our pH and fertilizer changes awhile back. This is exactly the kinds of results that we’re seeing across our plants. We’re getting incredible vigor, heavier laden plants and massive fruit practically across the board. It’s still blowing me away how such a seemingly minor change has reverberating impacts.
Since we have a bumper crop, we’re able to split our interests for preservation. We’ll do up a few jars of our beloved dilly beans in the canner, with the bulk of the crop getting our classic blanch and freeze treatment. We did leave a few small beans on the plants, plus they’re still putting on flowers, so we’ll have a few here and there for fresh eating as well over the next several weeks.
So, soon, we’ll be able to start demonstrating some more of our preservation techniques! It’s hard for us to take you along with every single harvest and preservation we do, but we’re definitely getting into the time of year where we’ll start knocking things off the preservation list!
This is always an exciting time of the season! The shift into plant maturation and harvesting is certainly one of the best parts of growing your own. Sometimes it still just blows us away that we can make all this food with just a few small seeds and some know-how!
