Harvest Monday October 28th, 2013

Did you know I've never had a fresh fig before? Well except at a restaurant. Now I've got to figure out what to do with them. the first I ate with some cheese. I'd like to cook the other three, but not sure about recipes. I guess I'll have to look some up.

I picked the first of the fall beans and maybe the last. There have been three frosts in the neighborhood this last week. For some reason my garden hasn't frosted over. Even when we got down to 30F. Not that I'm complaining. The beans are still alive. Tonight is supposed to be in the 20Fs. I can't imagine they will survive that.

I picked all my celery and froze it for the winter. The bucket of greens went into the compost pile. The cleaned up celery in the basket got weighed.

But today is mostly about my seed harvest. I winnowed and weighed my coriander and dill seed this week. And the dried beans were all dry and ready to weigh.

These are all the beans I picked this year (well the ones I haven't eaten already). Some were weighed in other weeks. But it is my dried bean stock for the winter. As you can see I've picked out the seeds for next year already. From left to right I have: Cherokee Trail of Tears black beans (first two jars), Jacob's Cattle, Mexican Pinto, Tigers Eye, and Tarbais. The last jar is also from Tarbais, but it had obviously crossed with another bean. I'm saving only the most perfectly Tarbais like beans for seed for next year.

Bean yield was down this year. I only got about 2/3rds of what I normally get. I always have trouble with rust here, but I had much more trouble than usual. I blame that on my experiment. I really like pole beans better than bush beans. They produce about three times as much in a given area. Though to be fair they do take the spot for the whole year, where bush beans could have a fall crop grow after them. So this year I tried to grow two rows of pole beans along the bed. One in front and one in back. But it just didn't give them enough airflow. So I'm going to have to go back to the chalkboard. I'm going to redo the rotation schedule for next year and see if I can get in more pole beans or not. The problem is that I can't grow summer crops at their foot as they block the sun too much. I wish my beds went east to west like at my last house. Then I could put the pole beans on the north side and not block anything. But the beds are square to the house and south is directly in the corner. The best I can do is plant them on the northwest side of the bed.

Yields lbs/sqft	2013	2012	2011
Trail of Tears	0.20	0.27	0.38
Tarbais	0.17	0.37	0.37
Mexican Pinto	0.17	na	0.31
Tiger Eye	0.04	0.10	na
Jacobs Cattle	0.07	0.09	na

You can tell from the above chart that dried bean yields are not very high in general. It isn't a crop people usually plant as your value per square foot is pretty low. It is a fun crop though and something that is easily stored over the winter. I even grew them at my last house where I was pressed for space (though not nearly as many).

• Alliums 1.96 lbs
• Beans 4.71 lbs
• Greens 1.78 lbs
• Herbs 0.41 lbs
• Weekly Tally 26.25 lbs
• Yearly Tally 473.86 lbs, $942.84

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.