Tomatoes and Beans and Ground Cherries, Oh My!

Sorry for the lack of posts! I need to get out there and take some pictures of the garden. In the meantime, here's what my harvest looked like late last week:

The things in the blue bowl are ground cherries. At this point we're harvesting that many every 2-3 days.  I *really* want to make jelly out of them, but we keep eating them straight from the bowl before I get a chance to jammify them. Peeling off the paper lanterns around them feels a lot like unwrapping candy before eating it. I need to hide them from the family (and myself!) until I have enough to make a few jars of jelly (or maybe a pie!).

Tomatoes and hot peppers are coming in in dribs and drabs. All of my tomato varieties this year are heirlooms. They taste sooo good, but I'm noticing that neighbors who planted all big-beef type tomatoes have a lot more red fruit on their vines. Next year I'll definitely plant a combo of everyday varieties and rarer types.  My favorite heirloom so far has been Black Krim, but I still have a few plants that are longer season tomatoes and don't have any ripe fruit yet (Aker's West Virginia, Sioux, Eva's Purple Ball and Brandywine), so I'm reserving my final judgement until I try them! Hopefully I'll get at least a couple fruit from each of them before the first frost!

And green beans, we have them coming out of our ears! This has definitely been the largest green bean harvest I've ever had. We've been looking up green bean recipes and having them with dinner a few times a week. We've had salted french fried green beans (our favorite so far), green bean casserole, and barbequed green beans. We gave a gallon zip lock bag of them to my in-laws when we visited, and we *still* have a gallon of them in the fridge. Time to look into freezing methods, me thinks.

We're finally in a bean-picking lull, but they're starting to flower again. The dang bean beetles have nibbled some of them to within an inch of their lives. I've been out there picking them and their eggs off whenever I can spot them. I'm thinking of paying the boys a quarter for every beetle found and smushed, and a dollar for any eggs found and smushed - although at this point the whole family is so beaned out I don't think anyone would be upset if there were no more beans (except maybe me!).

The kids went back to school today, so hopefully I'll have lots of time on my hands for some late season garden blogging, and start updating a lot more often!

Beans! (and a few little tomatoes)

It's finally bean harvest time! This was my second harvest of the week. the first, the day before yesterday, was a little smaller.

I've noticed that most veggie gardeners have a favorite green bean variety, and that's definitely true for me too. I *love* Tenderette bush beans. They're one of the few ever-bearing bush varieties. They're also heavy producers, and once they start, they keep you up to your eyeballs in green beans all summer.

Last year I decided to try pole beans for the first time (Kentucky Wonder), and by this date last year I still had no beans. I did end up with some good harvests a little later in the season, but not as good as the years I'd planted my precious bush beans. Plus pole beans require trellises. and I remember spending a long time building teepees last spring. 

So there you have it. If you're thinking of adding green beans to your garden next year, I highly recommend Tenderette!