Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Our First Harvest of Willow Leaf Butter Beans, and More Tomatoes!


Garden harvests from your own garden are wonderful!      We are benefitting a great deal from having a back yard vegetable garden! I wish everyone would start one for their own benefit. It really isn't hard to do in order to get some harvests from it!




I pressure canned the last ten quarts of snap beans for this year. These jars will be going to our storage area. I won't be canning any more snap beans this year because I'm letting the vines produce the pods of seeds of future plantings.








I went out Monday and picked all these veggies from our garden. These Park's Whoppers weighed in at seven pounds three ounces.








These twenty-two Celebrity tomatoes weighed nine pounds fourteen ounces.








These sixty-one Roma tomatoes weighed ten pounds thirteen ounces.








This represents the yield from the last picking of snap beans for this year. These beans weighed four pounds nine ounces and will be cooked up with a nice piece of country ham seasoning meat.








The tomato berry plant is not producing anywhere near what a plant did in a previous year for us, but we'll take these seven tasty little ones that weighed one and three quarter ounces.








Finally, the yellow pear tomatoes are beginning to come in like they should. These six weighed one and three quarter ounces.







Butter Beans!



This three pound harvest of butter beans represents our first picking ever of Willow Leaf Pole Lima Beans. They are a smaller variety of Limas, similar to a baby butter bean.









Those three pounds came out to be twelve ounces of shelled butter beans! A very nice yield! The type of beans we are growing are reported to be able to produce through to the first frost. That would be spectacular!

After including the weights of some harvests that I had not added from my previous post, the total garden weight produced this calendar year comes to two hundred fofty-five pounds.

That concludes this impromptu mid-week report for our back yard organic vegetable garden. Thanks for visiting and please feel free to share a comment if you would like to.

Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK

14 comments:

  1. Nice harvests. There are certain veggies that others love that I always hated growing up so have never grown them. Limas are one of those. I keep wondering if I would like them now. My tastes have changed so much from when I was a kid.

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    1. I didn't like eating lima beans when I was growing up either! These I think are different because they are smaller than a normal lima bean. It's been my experience that when you cook the large limas, they turn out rather mealy and not very satisfying. I would equate them to carrots or radishes that grow too long and get pithy. They're just not tasty to me and I don't enjoy them when they are like that. You can see from the seeds before you plant them that these are much smaller than a regular lima bean.
      We cook ours covered generously in water, add a little salt and two or three pats of butter, then cook them for quite a while at a low boil until they begin to change the appearance of the clear water to more of a broth-looking thickened soup. You may have to add a little more water to get them just right. When I get them the way I like them, the liquid is the same color as the lima beans. At that point, even the pot-liquor (broth) is delicious and isn't wasted. It's great with biscuits! You should try them... again!

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  2. I love the butter beans. I think I might put in a few next year even though Phil hates them, lol. They just look so yummy!
    I wish I was getting that many tomatoes but I only get 4 or 5 at a time and we tend to eat them all.

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    1. The butter beans are great! This is our first year with this type of bean. For several years prior to this one, I sowed bush type Henderson Baby Butter Bean seeds. Every year I would consistently lose most of the crop to bugs and rot from the pods laying on the ground. These Willow Leaf pole bean plants are doing great for us! I watered them tonight and noticed that there are many that have plumped out and need to be picked again, so I'll do that tomorrow. I say go with a pole variety to keep the pods off the ground, plus you can see them much more easily to see when they are ready for picking. The reason that I get so many tomatoes is because I have a total of 63 tomato plants.

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  3. I have to admit that I am jealous of your harvests! My beans and tomatoes won't be ready for a while :(

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    1. Oh your time is coming with all that garden space you are using! You'll be harvesting hand over fist before you know it!

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  4. What a bounty of tomatoes! Also a very nice haul of butter beans. Yum!

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    1. Thanks! I'm glad that I planted early in that strange warm March we had. I lost a few plants when the weather turned chilly for a while again, but the early planting really paid off. I am so happy with this type of butter bean that I can't believe it! It's been a great producer!

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  5. Very nice. Your veggies look so delicious. We are just beginning to harvest our pinto beans. And just finished the kidney beans. We didn't get a years supply, but they were fun to grow and they do double duty by putting nitrogen into the soil.

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    1. Thank you! They are delicious too! I wish more people would try to grow some of their food just to get it into their blood. I would love to have more garden space so I could grow some dry beans, but they just take up so much garen space for so long. You're fortunate to be able to do that.

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  6. Your tomatoes look fantastic and beans!! We are still at least 6 weeks away from having that many tomatoes so I'm really jealous.

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    1. We are blessed with being in an area where I can get three crops from my year-round garden.

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  7. Everything looks so wonderful! My garden is doin great this year, I love it. Been canning green beans. Yes, everyone should grow a garden.

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    1. Canning green beans! Hooray! It makes you feel good when you look at all those jars of beautiful beans that you canned yourself!

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