The garden is in full swing. This is what I collected yesterday, two days since the previous harvest:
The dried beans are very exciting for some reason. You let the pods stay on the plant til they dry out completely, but you don’t want them to stay on there too long lest they rehydrate in the rain or humidity. About half of them weren’t totally dry, so I put them on the dehydrator. After that, you can either freeze them for a short time or bake them on low heat, to make sure anything hanging out in there is dead. Then you can keep them forever!
Of the three kinds of beans I planted, the edamame is doing best. We’re going to have a ton of it. They’re much bigger plants than the shelling beans, so I think they kind of drowned them out. Next year, I’ll probably do more shelling beans and less edamame. The pole beans are still vining like crazy, but there aren’t many beans on there yet. I’m not sure if there’s a problem with them, or if they’re just slow starters.
The zucchini is almost dead, sadly. I thought it was just wilting because of the heat, but we learned too late that we have squash vine borers. Seriously, what a bunch of assholes. (We had them last year, too, but I didn’t know what they were… it just looks like the stem is rotting.) The plants are too far gone to save at this point, but at least we know how to prevent them next year.
With the jalapenos and anaheims, I made Michael Symon’s pickled chilis and escabeche.
The peppers above I just put in jars in the fridge (they’ll be best in a couple weeks), but the escabeche was my canning experiment. I rigged up a tray in a giant stock pot and boiled them for 10 minutes. It took approximately forever for that quantity of water to come to a boil. Once I took the jars out of the water, it took only a few minutes for the lids to pop and seal, so that’s a good sign! There’ll be no botulism in my house, thank you very much.
Since we’re all having sub sammiches for lunch today, I baked a giant batch of cheese straws. Oh, and Matt made corn chowder. I think quite possibly he has a crush on Michael Symon. Don’t tell him I know!