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Welcome to my zone 9a habitat garden near Houston, Texas.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Green beans and potatoes

Today's harvest form the vegetable garden was a particularly satisfying one. First came the potatoes.

Back in January, I planted Russian banana fingerling potatoes. It took them forever to come up. It was almost the first of March before they really started breaking the surface of the ground. After that they grew quickly, but by the end of April, the plants were fading and within the last couple of weeks they had all collapsed.

I didn't really think the plants had had time to produce much of anything, so it was without much hope that I decided to dig the bed today.


And just look what I found! I had actually grown some potatoes! Not a huge crop to be sure, but then I didn't plant for a huge crop. These nice little fingerlings will do for us for several weeks.

Next, it was on to the green bean bed to harvest my haricot vert heirlooms for which I had gotten the seeds from Seeds of Change earlier this year. I opted to plant bush beans instead of pole beans this year. The pole beans produce more and over a longer period of time. The bush beans produce one big crop and then a little crop and that's about it for them.



Today's pickin' was the big crop and it just about filled my harvest basket.

After picking the beans, we snapped and washed them, and then I pulled out a couple of big handfuls to cook for our lunch. The rest of them will be canned.

For our vegetarian lunch, I cooked the beans and a few of the fingerling potatoes, as well as some of the carrots that we had harvested from the garden earlier. On the side, I added beet pickles from the beets that I had harvested earlier still. Of course, I made some cornbread. You can't have vegetables from the garden without cornbread to accompany them!

Thus, our entire lunch, except for the cornbread, came from our garden. Food from a cordon bleu restaurant could not have tasted better! Nothing tastes better than the fruits of one's own labors.

The only thing that would have made it better was if I had taken the time to fry some green tomatoes to go with the other veggies. Next time, I will.

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