Heirloom green beans for seed
Though I feel a bit guilty, I did not plant turnips and greens for a late garden this year. I was just too burned out from a summer of gardening and canning.
Today I officially retired the garden. I picked the remaining green peppers. There was about a peck of them. I also picked the last of the green beans, which I had intentionally left on the vine to go to seed. They will be next year’s bean seeds. They are the family heirloom green beans that have been in my family for four or five generations. I’ve put them in the attic to dry before I shell them.
The black walnuts were given to me by a friend. I don’t have a walnut tree — though I’m still looking for one. These days plenty of people have mature walnut trees, but 99.9 percent of the crop lies on the ground and goes to waste because people just aren’t hungry enough anymore to do all the work of hulling them and cracking them. I’m not sure how far I’ll get with that job either, but I at least want to have a go at it.
Now if I only had access to an old, abandoned apple tree. My trees produced a small amount of fruit this year, but I’m still several years away from really having an apple crop.
A peck of peppers
Black walnuts, still in the hulls
4 Comments
Hello
Can you grow lettuce? Too short of a fall or just not practical?
Lettuce could definitely be grown in the fall. I need to keep that in mind…
I still have tomatoes in my garden and am thankful that we haven’t had an early frost here in southern Illinois, as I had about a 6 wk lull in tomato production – the same thing happened last year, the plants were flowering and had green fruit but none was ripening. I talked to other gardeners and found the same thing happening to them.
I am racking my brain trying to figure out why this is the case, especially 2 years in a row, and such different years to boot. I hope it is just an anomaly and not some weird effect of climate change, affecting plant hormones and delaying ripening into Sept.
Very odd, Trish. I had tomato problems this year, but nothing like that. We had a long period of wet weather here in midsummer, which caused blight on the leaves and no new blooms. Normally the tomatoes would have kept bearing, but the blight shut them down. I got only one wave of tomatoes.
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