By the grace of God, we got another 18 big round bales up before the rain. That brings our total this year up to just under sixty bales. Now if we can just get the rest up…

WillBaling_0656

I made a huge batch of mustard bean pickles out of the last bucket of Provider beans. Boy, did they ever turn out great. And since I overestimated how much vinegar/spices/sugar I’d need I canned up the leftover sweet and sour sauce in half-pint jars. My “mistake” let me have all this ready-on-hand sauce to dip chicken, pork, and fish in as well as to pour over chicken and pork roast as a glaze. (It really isn’t too mustardy … rather like hot mustard sauce without the “hot.”) We love it.

NewOldbeans_0688

Our beans are producing like CRAZY lately. I planted more than 27 different beans this year on three gardens. Some are yellow, some green, some dry, and others snap. Many are multi-purpose. All are doing excellent both in plants and the beans they’re making. We’re especially excited about a pole bean, Folsom Indian Ruin, which I was given while living in New Mexico. A neighbor knew we loved heirloom seeds and brought me a sample he’d found in a clay jar in his cow pasture, in the rocks of an Indian ruin. They’d been sealed with pine pitch and his son, who went to school at the University of New Mexico, took one and they carbon dated it back to 1,500 years! Some of those beans actually germinated!

Indian-Ruin-Bean_0694

These are a huge bean. The pods are like Kevlar so you couldn’t eat them as snap beans but the young beans are tender and make great shelly beans. As a dry bean, they are also tasty and swell up nearly the size of a ping-pong ball! (You have to mash them or slice them to eat them.) We’re so tickled to be able to pass them on this year as our row of beans are simply going crazy with both blossoms and pods. Actually, I’ve NEVER had so many blossoms on a bean in my life! Talk about production. No wonder those ancient Native Americans took the trouble to store them so well — Jackie

11 COMMENTS

  1. Rick,

    That’s too bad about your area’s drought. If we could just even up the weather around the country….. I’m glad your garden is doing well, though. Yep, I, too, always put up as much as I can in a bumper crop year because you just don’t know what next year’s going to throw your way. It seems we are blessed with “just enough” as it all evens out in the end. If we prepare.

  2. Miss Jackie, those Fulsom Indian beans sound amazing!!!! So glad you have had some haying weather. Where I live in Pa we have had wonderful haying weather but soooooo little rain since early June. we have had a few little showers of a quarter inch in the past 2 weeks but the grass is dusty and brown, the farmers corn is shorter than usual with curled leaves and not much corn. My garden is growing as i water thanks to my 25 gallon /minute well, but it isn’t as good as a few days of frequent showers or a few all night brisk drenching rains. Looks like a poor year for honey production. For this reason I always try to keep extra quarts of honey from good years in the fruit cellar. Bless you all!!! Rick

  3. Jackie, that is very interesting about the Folsom Indian Ruin bean. Amazing that they were still viable after all this time. Nature is incredible and there is much wisdom in the ancestral ways of handling food.

  4. Laurie,

    They are certainly amazing! I just found one nearly a foot long with big fat beans in it. There are billions of flowers on it still, each with tiny beans below them. Wow!!!

  5. Steve,

    Glad to hear you got so many Dragon Tongues up! They’re so tasty and pretty too. Not to mention productive. It’s so nice to look at all those jars in the pantry, isn’t it???

  6. The Folsom Indian Ruin bean sounds amazing! Like others, I look forward to when the seed is available. Glad you were able to get some hay in.

  7. Our beans are doing great this year to. I picked 28 pounds of Dragon Tongue beans yesterday. Got them all canned up, with the help of your excellent book, and now have 61 more pints of beans in the pantry.

    Thanks again for all you do.

  8. So glad you were able to get some haying done! Love the story on the beans. Will look forward to those being available for purchase. Thanks so much for the update Jackie!

  9. zelda,

    I tried when we lived in New Mexico and they kind of poo-pooed it, saying it was “just another runner bean”.

Comments are closed.