This month's painting is another Van Gogh. I love the harvest colors in this one. The leaves are turning here in Pennsylvania's beautiful Northern Tier, and I can see these colors everywhere I look now. Autumn is my favorite time of year, and it always seems to
go by way too quickly.
The ContainerSeeds Bookstore is online and open for business now, at http://www.containerseeds.com/bookstore.html We're on schedule for starting to sell seeds and supplies in November or December - in plenty of time for your next year's garden planning.
Our first frost was September 19. Wow. September 19. That accounted for all the beans, and finished off the last tomatoes (the few that had stubbornly refused to succumb to blight earlier) except the volunteer tomatoes growing in the compost bin. We've been eating tomatoes from those compost-bin volunteers ever since the first frost. Sadly, the compost-pile tomatoes are goners now too: we had a very hard frost last night and it did them in. Since we had our first ripe tomato on June 8 this year, we've had home-grown tomatoes for almost four months now - not bad at all for northern Pennsylvania, and in the mountains.
Swiss chard continues and is beautiful and delicious - it does not mind the cold. The peppers and eggplants are all gone now, as are the squash and cutting flowers. I never got around to planting kale, so we have no kale to eat throughout fall and part of winter. Sigh. Can't harvest 'em if you don't plant 'em.
By the way, I really enjoyed the cutting flowers. This is the first year I have grown them, and I've been just amazed at how much I have enjoyed them. (Note for next year: many more flowers!) Dwarf sunflowers are really great for bouquets and definitely suitable for container-growing. This variety (Music Box) gets about two feet tall. Unlike its larger cousins, Music Box is multi-branching and each plant has many blossoms, in a variety of colors, as you can see.
I'm growing romaine and mixed lettuce on the deck now. They don't mind frost, and both will have time to mature before serious cold sets in (I hope). I can always bring them indoors if I have to.
And - as the happy possessor of a gigantic bay window in our living room - I will be growing miniature tomatoes (pictured), mini-eggplants, and mini-peppers throughout winter (more pictures in next month's newsletter). I grew these indoors last winter, and all fruited and did very well. We supplemented the short days of winter sunlight with fluorescent lights hung in the window, over the plants - just cheap ordinary shop lights with cheap ordinary 40-watt fluorescent bulbs.
I don't think that tomatoes, eggplants, or peppers will fruit with only fluorescent lights or with only winter's limited sunshine. But they did very well with both last winter. I used the lights in the evenings (from around sunset to 10 pm) and on days with heavy cloud cover or days when it was snowing or raining.
I will also plant mesclun mix today or tomorrow (to grow outdoors) and will be growing some herbs and salad greens indoors, plus "mustard and cress" (as put on egg-salad sandwiches by the British) and sprouts. After all, I need to grow something to have pictures for the newsletters. :-) Besides, I'm just not happy unless I'm growing something!
Just what are "snap beans" anyway? "Snap beans" are words used by garden writers to denote what the rest of us call "string beans" or "green beans". ;-) I can see the logic of calling them "snap beans" though: the strings have mostly been bred out of them so that you are not likely to encounter strings unless you let the beans become too overgrown and, as to "green beans" - well, some are purple and some are yellow, so "green beans" is somewhat of a misnomer. But whatever you call them, if you grow them yourself and pick them while they are young and tender, they will be vastly superior to the sad excuses-for-beans in supermarkets. Homegrown beans are actually delicious! That's a strong word to use for a vegetable generally considered somewhat ordinary, but it's true.
From a gardening standpoint, there are two main types of snap beans: bush beans and pole beans (more on this in a minute). From a cooking/eating standpoint, both bush and pole beans come in green, yellow, purple (although the purple ones turn green when cooked), and Romano beans - a broader, flatter bean, sometimes called "Italian green beans". The Romanos tend to have a stronger and "beanier" flavor. Then there are yellow Romanos and purple ones too.... Yellow beans are also sometimes called "wax beans."
I like variety in gardening (and eating), and I enjoy different colors too and I hope you will also, so for both bush and pole beans, besides selling the different colors individually, we will be selling "variety packs" with a small quantity of each color (and of Romanos), so that you can have the fun of growing some of each kind. These will be packaged separately rather than mixed together, so that you'll know which is which. And since all snap beans are ideal for container-growing, I have the fun of selecting the very nicest varieties to sell at ContainerSeeds.com. Believe me, there are many lovely varieties of beans, so picking the ones I consider the "very best" is not an easy job. They're all easy and fun to grow, and delicious when not allowed to become overgrown. This is really important if you want the very best beans: pick them while they are young and succulent. Also, if you allow the beans to become fully mature, the plants will stop producing new beans: just what you don't want.
From a gardening standpoint, all the colors are treated alike, except that purple beans are said to be able to withstand colder soil than the rest. I have not experimented with this but have no particular reason to doubt it. In any case, if you are growing them in containers, cold soil isn't going to be a problem. Containers warm up faster and - if you are at all worried about a container's soil being too cold - you can pour a teakettle or two of hot water into the container (then wait until it cools off to plant the seeds, of course).
You will need to decide whether you want to grow bush or pole beans, or both. Both are very well-suited for container-growing. Both have pretty flowers and are nice-looking plants. The advantage to bush beans is that they produce beans faster than pole beans, and they don't need any support (trellis or poles). They'll produce most of their beans in a relatively short period of time. Gardeners who plant bush beans therefore generally use succession plantings to have a supply of beans throughout the summer months. Bush beans grow quickly, only taking about 40 to 60 days to produce a crop, so you can fit several successive plantings into a summer in most areas.
Pole beans, first of all, require support - poles or a trellis. Pole beans can serve as a living curtain of shade if grown in front of hot, sunny windows (I've done this by stringing twine from nails in the roof overhang to bricks on the ground and letting the beans grow up the twine). They take longer than bush beans to start producing beans, but they will keep on producing beans throughout the summer and you'll get more beans per square foot of planted area from pole beans (although I think succession plantings of bush beans can come close to matching pole beans' production). We use a "bean teepee" - poles tied at the top - which can easily be put around a container. An alternative is any kind of trellising or nets, or letting them grow up string or twine.
We have been using pieces of rebar (concrete reinforcing rod) for our bean teepees. However, Bountiful Container suggests that you use wider poles - poles more than one inch in diameter. I think pieces of 1 " x 2" lumber would work well. The use of wider poles "produces a more concentrated growth pattern, with the full length of the vine condensed by the wide circles and the beans themselves bunched up thickly together, which is what you want when your space is limited." This is an excellent idea to keep in mind. If the bean vines reach the top of the poles, trim them at the very tip to force them to put out new growth below. I think pole beans would happily grow forever (remember "Jack and the Beanstalk"?) but there's no point in using poles higher than you can comfortably reach to pick the beans.
OK, now you've decided which kind of beans to plant - or decided to plant both. How do you plant them? First of all, snap beans are frost-tender (will not withstand temperatures below 32 F - or 0 C) and prefer warm weather. So wait until after your last frost and until the weather is reliably warm - maybe gambling by planting purple beans (only) a week or two before the last frost. I've always planted my beans directly outdoors and this is certainly easiest. Most of my gardening books say that they do not like to be transplanted, although I start lots of seeds indoors that theoretically do not like to be transplanted. However, I don't see any reason to start beans indoors. They are large seeds, easy to handle, and very fast to sprout, and do just fine when planted directly outdoors.
Before sowing your bean seeds, it's helpful to soak them in warm water for an hour or two to soften the seed coats. It's also helpful to "inoculate" the beans. The inoculants are a bacteria that legumes (beans, peas, lentils, etc.) need to both use nitrogen and actually add it to the soil. (They actually enrich the soil in which they are grown, which is an excellent feature of growing beans, of course.) While these bacteria do occur naturally in the soil, the use of an inoculant ensures that your beans will have the right bacteria and in sufficient amounts, and will allow them to produce more beans for you. This is particularly true for container gardeners who use sterilized potting soil and/or a soil-less mix. The inoculants come as either a black powder in which you dredge the bean seeds, or granules that you sprinkle in the planting holes before sowing the seeds. One type of inoculant will cover peas and all the commonly grown garden beans. They are quite inexpensive and should be available at your local garden center, as well as online.
Plant bush beans about 4" apart from each other (each way), so that you wind up with nine plants per square foot of surface area. Just draw a grid in your container by running your finger along in the soil, dividing each square foot of surface area into nine sections. Then put the beans in the middle of each section. For pole beans, plant about eight seeds per pole - in a circle around poles, or in a double line in front of a trellis. You may need to thin these down to about six plants per pole later. To plant the seeds, you just space them and then push them about one inch deep into the soil, smoothing the soil back over them. Keep the soil moist until they have sprouted. Then stand back and watch them grow!
Beans prefer to be evenly well-watered so don't let your containers dry out between waterings. It's very difficult (almost impossible) to over-water outdoor container plants so I wouldn't worry about over-watering them (by contrast to indoor container plants which are easy to overwater). Although the beans will supply themselves with nitrogen if you have used inoculant, I recommend that you use a balanced fertilizer or plant food at least monthly on the beans, to ensure that they receive the other nutrients they need (particularly for container-grown plants). I have found that they do much, much better than unfertilized beans. I think this is essential if you're using soil-less mix (Pro-Mix or the like) as your growing medium, and beneficial in all cases.
Beans are subject to some minor pests and at least one major pest. Flea beetles have been a minor pest of beans I've grown in the ground, but they have never found any container plants that I've grown. Mexican bean beetles are the major pest and they are horrid - their larvae will eat holes in your bean leaves until the leaves are skeletonized and the plant dies. (Knock on wood, we don't seem to have them here, although I've had to cope with them in other places.) Here's a picture of the eggs, larvae, and adults.
The first control measure is good garden clean-up each fall: don't leave plant debris in your containers (or in your in-ground garden) as that will just be a home for overwintering bean beetles and other pests. The second control measure is to check the undersides of the leaves for the yellow eggs and crush them whenever you see them. Recommendations for other (and stronger) control measures can be found on the Gardens Alive! website.
Alternatively, you can cover bush bean plants with floating row cover (or nylon netting) to prevent the beetles from laying their eggs on your plants. Since beans don't require insect pollination, you can leave the row cover on throughout their life cycle, only removing it to pick the beans. For containers that need floating row cover protection, I make a chicken-wire cage in the container and cover that with the row cover. However, I don't need to use any insecticides or row cover on container-grown beans, and hopefully you won't either. But it's good to know what to do just in case.
Now you've got your beans! Lots of lovely beans. Please pick them when they're young and tender. Just briefly steamed, they are lovely. They're also great in a stir-fry or soup. If you have too many beans for eating fresh, they are very easily preserved by freezing and they keep their quality well: just cut or break the beans into pieces (or leave them whole) and briefly blanch them (drop them into boiling water). They only need to be blanched for about a minute or until the color changes from purple to green, or from green to the more vivid green that cooked beans have, or to a more vivid yellow in the case of yellow wax beans. Then dump them into a large bowl of cold water with ice cubes floating around to cool them quickly. Then drain in a colander, package in a freezer bag or container, label, and freeze. And that's all there is to it.
You can easily save seeds from your (non-hybrid) beans, and I do save bean seeds. (I think most, possibly all, snap beans are open-pollinated, or non-hybrid.) Suzanne Ashworth (in her terrific book on seed saving entitled Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners) explains that bean flowers are "perfect" meaning that each flower has both male and female parts and pollinates itself: however, there is some (perhaps remote) possibility of insect pollination as well and, therefore, of varieties becoming crossed with each other (mixed up). If you intend to save the seeds in order to sell them or distribute them via The Seed-Savers Exchange, this would be a concern and measures to prevent it would be desirable. But if you just intend to save the seeds for your own use the following year, I don't see it as a problem. Certainly, I've often saved bean seeds without any apparent mixing-up of varieties the following year.
To save the seeds is simplicity itself: you just let a few pods mature and dry on the vine before picking. When you have picked the yellowed and dried pods, then you open them and remove the beans (the seeds) inside. It's a good idea to freeze the seeds for at least 48 hours to kill any possible insect eggs in or on them. Then allow them to warm to room temperature inside the container in which you froze them (so condensation won't gather on the seeds), and then store the dry seeds in a cool dark place. <Begin shameless plug> Or, of course, you can take the simpler and easier alternative of buying your next year's seeds from ContainerSeeds.com. <End shameless plug>
By the way, runner beans, the bean most grown in Great Britain, are a different species - Phaseolus coccineus. They have larger and more showy flowers, prefer cooler growing conditions, and are (to my American tastebuds at least) not as good to eat. They resemble (again, to me) an overgrown and tougher snap bean - this may be because I didn't pick them young enough. I'll be growing them again this coming summer, and will pick them younger. They are very useful for people who live in cool-summer areas and/or who want more decorative bean plants. There are other types of bean as well, such as the Asian yard-long beans or lima beans.... but this article is already too long and really only meant to describe snap beans. And so ends (at last!) this Plant Profile. There's just a lot to be said about beans, I guess.
Since no one but me submitted any tips, I won the prize for the Tip of the Month! I really enjoyed it, too <grin> and I'm not going to tell you what it was. Anyway, this month's tip is: Grow high-rise carrots or other long root vegetables, or the "box within a box" idea. Almost all vegetables will grow happily in about 8" depth of soil (almost all: not big tomato plants, etc.). You do not want to increase work or to use more growing medium (soil-less mix, potting soil, etc.) than you must. Weight is sometimes an issue for container gardeners too (think of roof-top gardens). Most container gardeners probably are content to grow the shorter varieties of carrots (I know I am) - the round ones, such as Parisian Market Carrots, or the short stubby ones.
But suppose you really, really want to grow a few long carrots: or a few parsnips, or something else with really long roots. No problem: use the high-rise idea. Put a (smaller) wooden box about one foot deep *on top of* the soil in your (larger) container. Fill the box with soil. Plant your long-rooted plants in the box. Or, if you are carpentry-challenged like me, cut the bottom out of a plastic plant pot or dishpan, and use that as the high-rise "box".
I am indebted to Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening website (http://www.squarefootgardening.com) for this idea. There are many good ideas, both here and in Bartholomew's book Square Foot Gardening, that are easily converted to container gardening.
If you submit a tip that I can use in the Newsletters, you may win a prize! A small, but nice, prize will be given each month to the person who submits the best tip (and at least for now, it appears that you won't have much competition). Tips can be about growing, preserving, or cooking your harvest. Send tips to: tips@containerseeds.com
I've chosen a hearty soup for this month's recipe. Now that the weather is cool, we will again enjoy all kinds of soups and stews. I could happily live on soups and stews all winter, and salads all summer! This soup is easy and fairly quick to make and freezes well. Add some homemade corn muffins, and you've got a complete meal.
Why not bake an apple or two for dessert? You can bake apples in your microwave in a very few minutes. Just core the apples (I have a gadget for this called an "apple corer", but you can do it with a knife). Cut a slit around the circumference of the apple so steam can escape. Fill the core with raisins or currants, sprinkle with cinnamon, and drizzle honey or maple syrup over the apples. Put them in a microwaveable dish with about 1/2 inch of water in the bottom of the dish. Cover with vented plastic wrap. Microwave on full power for about 7 minutes per apple, or until they look "baked" and soft. Serve either warm or cold - they're good both ways.
By the way, MacIntosh, although great eating apples, are no good for baking, they collapse into a pile of mush.... and Red Delicious apples are no good for anything except possibly throwing at people you dislike! (My husband accurately calls them "Red Disgustings.") I like to bake Stayman Winesaps or Cortlands but there are many other types that bake well. We have no cellar (darn it!) and no root cellar, so we cannot really stock up on apples, but we enjoy good local apples in fall and early winter.
Easy Black Bean Soup - Serves 6
Saute onion, garlic, and peppers in a soup pot in a little water or oil until onions are transparent, stirring frequently. Add the cumin, 1/3 cup water, and canned tomatoes (chop the tomatoes first if whole) and their juice.
Cover, bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 5-10 minutes.
Add beans and their liquid (or dry cooked beans and additional water), and the orange juice, and continue to simmer.
Drain and chop the sun-dried tomatoes, add them to the soup, cook an additional five minutes. Remove from heat. Puree half the soup in a blender or food processor or use one of the stick blenders right in the pot, which is much easier, or just mash some of the beans with a potato masher. The purpose of doing this is just to thicken the soup.
Dish out the soup, then sprinkle the chopped cilantro on top, and serve.
Per Serving: 220 Calories; 1g Fat (4.4% calories, from fat); 13g Protein; 42g Carbohydrate; 13g Dietary Fiber; 0mg Cholesterol; 291mg Sodium. Exchanges: 2 Grain(Starch); 1/2 Lean Meat; 1 1/2 Vegetable; 0 Fruit; 0 Fat.
I hope you enjoy October's autumn weather and seasonal foods.
Until next month,
Pat
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