daysingarden
A garden diary
Harvesting green pole beans
Harvesting green pole beans.
Today, July 13, the first Fortex green pole beans were harvested. As you can see, the beans grow quite long while still slender enough to qualify as filet beans.
After picking the beans, I snap the stems off while sitting at my outdoor work table. Why be a kitchen drudge cleaning vegetables hunched over a sink when I can sit in the shade and listen to the birds sing. While sitting and stemming beans, I often think of my father-in-law, who took it upon himself to stem green beans bought at the farmer’s market. He would sit in the shade in the backyard of the family summer cottage, with our old black lab invariably lounging nearby, and stem the beans. Nice memory while I’m stemming beans in the shade with Daisy, my yellow lab, as my garden companion.
By the time the beans are brought to the kitchen, they are stemmed and snapped into the right lengths for eating.
After a quick rinse, the beans go into the fridge in their cooking pan until time for dinner. Boil the beans 9 minutes or so–you want them cooked but still crunchy–in salted water, add a little butter or olive oil, and taste a preview of summer. Now, if we only had some vine-ripe tomatoes.
Tonight’s dinner was a salmon fillet with beans and onions on a bed of garden lettuce, with a little cottage cheese, orange slices, and flat bread on the side. Not bad summer eating.
