"Green" Beans are Soooooo Five Minutes Ago

From left to right: Tanya's Pink Pod, Dragon's Tongue, Purple Queen, Kentucky Wonder Wax, Red Swan, and Rattlesnake. At the top, an unknown bush-type roma one of the kids planted from a bag of 12-bean soup mix (turns out it's quite good as a snap actually, may save the seeds). One cool thing about the Tanya's Pink pod is that the color seems to fade from green to pink and back green again as you turn it in your hand, much like some kinds of Indian sari fabric, an effect impossible to convey in a still photo.

The sad thing about the red/purple coloring is that once you cook them, all signs of color is gone and they look just like plain old green (or yellow) beans. Oh well. They're good raw in salads too.

Some Really New Potatoes

OK I just couldn't wait, so I started scratching around the base of some of the potato stems and here's what I came up with:

Not pictured: Little Red Riding Hood. That one was the very last one to send up leaves, in fact for a while I thought they had all died. So its plants are still small and the tubers I did see were so tiny I just left them alone.

Remarkable color in the Skagit Beets, considering most "red-fleshed" potatoes are more on the "pink" side, and notice no white ring:

See the marked contrast between the Nordic Ocober, with nearly pure white flesh and the golden flesh of the Skagit Valley Gold. However, the Skagit is not quite as "orange" as I had hoped:

The aptly named "Paint Jar":

Black and Blue (Negro y Azul):

I did heat up some Skagit Valley and some Negro y Azul in the microwave for about 60 seconds, for a taste test. Skagit was fairly dry, and fully cooked, but just moist enough, with a strong and distinctive baked-potato aroma from even such a tiny marble-sized tuber. It was very tasty. It reportedly has some solanum phureja in its pedigree.

The Negro y Azul was more watery and had a decidedly grassy taste. Maybe it just wasnt fully cooked, or maybe it was exposed to the sun and was "green" (but with such dark pigment, there's really no way to know). Hope that the more mature tubers later this season have better results.

The rest of the samples will be lightly steamed tonight for dinner.

What a Difference a Month Makes

You all remember that dreadful morning when I woke up to a frozen garden and lost most of my tomatoes which had been planted out less than a week?

Here is how the White Beauty tomato looked that day. I left it in the ground, because it had one leaf that was not dead.


Can you believe that this is the same plant 4 weeks later. No sign of flower buds yet, but I'm not complaining.

Same with this Bolivian Rainbow pepper, it was the only seedling of this type I had, turned to total goo.

It looked very dead for quite awhile, but it is now leafing out! It's only 3 inches tall but I am overjoyed. Peppers are tropical perennials, you know. Come October, this plant will be overwintering in my finest pot, front and center in the dining room window.

Mr. Casper with frozen bud...

...now looks lush and healthy.

New developments in the garden:

Little Wonder peas planted way too late are slowly coming along.

These below are an unnamed blue-podded variety with brown-skinned peas:

And these below were planted from a bag of yellow split peas from the supermarket. I separated out a handful of pea halves that seemed to have enough of the germ still attached, and planted out the ones that germinated. Cool, free seeds. Compared to the two garden varieties above, the leaves on these are much smaller.

Also, get a load of those wacky tendrils! They should market this and call it "Medusa".

Love the diversity in garden peas. While we're at it, note the diversity in tomato blossoms:

Matt's Wild Cherry tomato above, and a Black Sea Man below.

By the way, we ate the first tomato yesterday for dinner. Boy it was good.

Chance Seedlings

Did you know that most of today's mass marketed apple varieties were were originally discovered growing wild from seed? Old varieties such as Newton Pippen, Arkansas Black, and the famous Cox Orange Pippin. More significantly, today's supermarket staples like Golden Delicious, Ginger Gold, Jonathan and Granny Smith (among many others) were all originally discovered as volunteer plants found sprouting at the edge of the orchard or in a compost pile. However, we are always cautioned by the “horticultural industry” (growers and university research programs) not to plant the seeds out of our store-bought apples because they will not grow “true from seed”--like that's a bad thing. We are told that the resulting plant will most likely give small sour ugly non-disease-resistant sparse (unmarketable) mutant fruits, therefore a waste of time and effort. I think that the horticultural industry discourages folks from planting apple trees from seed, for their own reasons--so that they can sell us, by exclusive license, grafts of their supposedly superior product. Excuse me, isn't the new catch phrase “biodiversity”? Don't get me wrong, the university breeding programs have their place; after all, they gave us Liberty, Gold Rush and Enterprise, didn't they? In fact my favorite eating apple happens to be Gala, which is also the result of a controlled breeding project.

Before I did the above little bit of research, Junior Gardener and I had planted the pips from a Granny Smith and a Gala apple into pots set on the kitchen window, she with high hopes but myself with low expectations. I schooled her with what I had been lead to believe- they probably won't sprout, but if one of them does, don't expect it to have edible apples on it. Well every last one sprouted and are growing very well on the cold January window sill. So now who knows. Maybe one of them will eventually bear fruit good enough to find its place along side it's parents at the supermarket. Then we will be getting the last laugh collecting the license fees when our little tree is propagated for commercial use. Or maybe we'll just get 7 sturdy unnamed sour crabapple trees to feed the birds in winters to come. Whatever. It's all good. Won't it be cool to be able to say to friends and admirers that my little espalier row of apples along side the driveway was planted from super market apple seeds. Of course apples won't usually come into bearing until 7-10 years from seed. Apparently there are ways around that as well. I am so inspired now that I plan to have a row of supermarket pear seedlings on the other side of the yard, as soon as I get some more pots for the seeds.