Fruits of the Garden

My minimalist garden is really bearing fruit. For the first time ever, I have not planted too much. I have so little that I still have to go to the Farmers' Market. However, what I have is good. I have two barely producing tomato plants, Early Girl, and I think, Sun something. I also have a very nice crop of beans.

I just love fresh green beans and this year I planted the beans from seeds I saved from last year or so. I had no idea what they were. One hill popped right up and started climbing up the redwood poles that The Artist put out for them. The others had a much more difficult time of it, but two finally took off. I didn't realize it until tonight, but the two others in the second hill were really bush beans, not pole beans. However, the pole beans turned out to be Kentucky Wonder, yum, yum!

The first, fast-growing hill of pole beans had me puzzled. I had never had those beans before. Wide, bumpy, long beans from white flowers. I remembered that I had once had some scarlet runner bean seeds, so I looked them up in the Sunset Gardening Book (the bible of Western gardening) and sure enough. Scarlet runner beans can have either red or white flowers.

The scarlet runner are really good beans, but I can understand why they aren't grown commercially. The pods are all different sizes, and it makes cooking them difficult. But they are really good. Very meaty with big seeds. Sunset says they can be substituted for lima beans when they get big. But raw or steamed, they are great!

In my photo, the scarlet runner are in front and on the right. The Kentucky Wonder are on the left.