vegetable gardens

Ours are doing great, even with all the rain.  The raised beds are producing best because of good drainage.  A 4X50 Raised Bed of Blue Lake Snap Beans made nearly 2 bushel in two times over.   The third pick will be pull them up and strip off what's left.

Wow Ken, your garden is that far along? I just put my peppers and tomatoes in the last 2 weekends over here in Midland. Hope it does better than last year.

JC, Ted you guys got any icicles up yet, or are you going for vegetable soup. Going to try and get everything in by the end of this weekend.

Spose to get to 88 today then drop down to low 70's for a couple then creep back to mid 80's mid week. What a roller coaster, I smell trouble.

Shammers, that called forbidden fruit.

Way down here along I20 we plant Irish Tater seed pieces on Presidents Day. Feb 15th. I dug my Kennebeck whites and my Lasota reds between soaking rains last week. Nothing to brag about tater crop this year. Time to find some new tater ground for next year.

Edited by Ken in Texas - 01 Jun 2019 at 9:22pm

Ken in Texas wrote:       C Tuck tell me more about the heirloom green bean you grow. Is it a pole or bush variety?  I presume you save some bean seed so not to loose the something special about them.

Almost 40 years ago, Dad found a tenderpod stringless bush bean that he liked. Mom liked them too and found if she french cut and blanched them for the freezer, they were nearly as good a s fresh. They are great for canning too, they way I like em.
 Anyway, Dad couldn't get that seed the next year, so he pick some stragglers from what was left in the garden. He kept them going till his last garden in 2008 and my brother and I have been keeping them going, saving some for seed every year.
 I call The RST beans, Dad's initials or Roberts Stringless Tenderpod.

I have never grown any other variety of bean since I've been keeping these seeds back and there aren't any green beans within a mile or 2 of me in any other gardens.
 From a google search on bean pollination, "Most beans do in fact self-pollinate before they open, and for many varieties of beans cross-pollination is indeed a rare occurrence."
 That being said, about 5 years ago, I had one plant that produced the same looking bean, but it had the burgundy color on the whole seed. All the others have white seeds with flecks of burgundy around the germ. I kept those separate, just to see what grew from them, but never ended up planting them. They are still probably tucked away somewhere? I assumed it was a throw back to generations before, but don't know.