Last night I picked enough purple and yellow snap beans to have what my grandparents would have defined as “a mess.”
The yellow beans are Cherokee wax and the purples are, if I remember correctly, Purple Queen.
As the first real produce from our garden of buckets and tubs, they are worth about $850 a pound, based on current return on investment. As we speak, they are cooling themselves in the refrigerator and soon will fulfill their destinies on a plate with some pot roast.
Kindra says Google showed her how to cook the Purple Queens so that they stay purple, and I hope it works. They’re pretty beans.
Now that we’ve actually gotten enough of something to have an actual side dish, my lower back and I am ready to proclaim this container gardening project a success.
As you may remember, Kindra and I planted our garden in 18-gallon tubs and five-gallon buckets. As noted, we have beans in the house, with potatoes, okra, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and cukes on the way.
Kindra actually did far more work than I did and easily qualifies for a merit badge in container and raised bed gardening.
The potatoes will be ready to harvest soon. Instead of digging them as in years past, my lower back is looking forward to upsidedowning the tubs onto a tarp and letting younger hands pick out the spuds.
Even though I can’t eat them now, I’m eager to see how they turned out.
Kindra has a good recipe for bread and butter pickles and wanted to grow cukes, so we planted some National Pickling in buckets and put up a trellis for them to grow on.
So far, so good. They are blooming up a storm and are covered with little cukes.
Along the way, we’ve learned a few things, the most significant being that a vegetable in a five-gallon bucket needs a lot of water once the temperature hits 90 degrees. And when I say a lot, I mean a couple of times a day, at least.
I’m thinking that we should stick to the 18-gallon tubs for hot weather crops and use the five-gallon buckets for carrots, radishes and the like.
We’re already planning a fall garden and have the seeds on hand already.
Maybe we can bring that $850 a pound down a little bit.