Long Beans Stretch Out the Harvest

We are so pleased that our Chinese Long Beans are producing their first crop of the season.  Our experience has shown these beans to be a valuable addition to our summer crops since they like the heat and produce vigorously throughout the summer. 

Of course, I turned to the Internet when I first thought of writing about our Long Beans and found that they have many fine qualities besides the ones I already knew about (they like the heat, are tender and tasty and cook very quickly.)  Nutritionally, they are good sources of iron, fiber, vitamin B1, folate, copper, magnesium, manganese, phosphorous, potassium and zinc.  They are also a good source of calcium, vitamins B2 and B6 and selenium. 

I also discovered that they are members of the cowpea family, the same family as black eye peas.  However the immature pods are tender and very similar in taste to string beans.  They are more limp than string beans and can measure up to three feet long, although a foot to a foot and a half is a more average size.  This year we have planted the usual green variety and also ones that are burgundy in color. 

A bean of many names, they are also known as Asparagus Beans, Snake Beans and Yard-Long Beans as well as the name I favor, Long Beans.  They are a staple crop of East Asia where they have been cultivated for centuries.  “Google” Long Beans for recipe ideas and you will find Szechuan Green Beans as well as many for stir fries.  They take to seasonings such as these quite well, but we find them delicious simply briefly cooked and tossed with salt, pepper and olive oil or butter.  I do like to caramelize some of our sweet onions and toss them with the beans too. 

Long beans are a great way to stretch out the green bean eating season.  And they certainly measure up to our production and quality standards.  And, as you may have noted, they lend themselves to bad puns.

Suzy

Practicing No-Till Gardening on Elm Street

He may not have full use of his right arm yet, but I know Robert is mostly recovered from the break in that arm which laid him low from the end of March into early June.  He has demonstrated his recovery this past week by creating a new garden bed along the back driveway that leads into the gardens.  And thoroughly enjoying the process despite some soreness.

His vision for the new area is to plant it with flowers and herbs, creating a pleasing sight as you enter the garden.  And in its preparation, he has carefully demonstrated our practice of no-till gardening.  After spreading a good thick layer of some of our rich black composted dirt, he laid newspapers over the dirt.  He wet the papers as he laid them so they would not blow away before he put the top layer of mulch over them. He used pine straw (as that is what we had the most of) for this mulch layer; it could be leaves or straw, old hay, whatever.  Now he is ready to begin the planting, parting the pine straw and making holes in the newspaper layer as he puts each plant in the soil.  The final step will be to pull the pine straw mulch back around the plant. 

And that is a simple demonstration of “no-till” gardening.  It works for vegetables as well as for flowers.  Our original garden bed was only tilled once, back in 2004 when we first began to grow a small area of vegetables for ourselves.   We have piled on the mulch and never used a hoe or tilled a bed since that. If we are sowing seeds, we part the mulch and sow and when the sprouts get to a reasonable size, we pull the mulch back around them.  We like doing things this way and have reasons for our preference for this method.  Let’s look at some of the reasons we believe this system works so well to build a healthy soil and healthy plants. 

It is beneficial to the soil.  You do not disturb the natural layering of the soil so nutrients, air and beneficial humus are most abundant near the surface where the plant roots can access them. 

Weed seeds are not exposed to the light and air that they need to germinate.  So there is not the necessity to hoe out the weeds.  There will be some weeds, but not as many as you find in a tilled garden and they are easily pulled by hand. 

A covering of mulch not only discourages weeds, it also helps to conserve water.  In addition, the organic materials of mulch prevent the run-off of rain as well as slow the evaporation of water. The mulch also tempers the effects of cold weather as well as the heat. 

Frequent applications of mulch to a garden build the soil and increase its fertility. The rich layers of organic materials in the beds are beneficial to the microorganisms that fight off pathogens and contain substances that help nutrients in the soil become more available to the plants.

It saves time.  You can plant sooner if you do not have to turn the soil and wait for it to dry out.  Just poke the plants into the ground or drop in the seeds. 

We have followed a book by Lee Reich, Weedless Gardening, as our guide to this method over the years we have been gardening on Elm Street.  The benefits of no-till above come from his writings.  It has worked for us and we see improvement in our soil each year.  We also enjoyed reading older books by a lady with a good sense of humor, Ruth Stout, who wrote How To Have A Green Thumb Without An Aching Back back in 1955.  So Robert’s exercise in creating this new gardening space is nothing new.  Matter of fact, this style of gardening goes way back and follows the process nature takes to create fertile soil – from the top down.  The first gardeners gardened this way too as they had little in the way of tools.  If you are interested in trying no-till gardening, we highly recommend that you read Lee Reich. 

Suzy

Compost Matters

Elm Street Garden compost piles 

Compost really does matter to us here at Elm Street Gardens.  It is the all-important addition to our garden year round.  We have added it constantly to our no-till beds over the years and have found it really pays off in the creation of the lovely loose rich soil in which our plants thrive. 

There is some science to creating this wonderful “black gold,” but it’s really pretty easy.  By observing at least roughly the correct ratio of “brown” to “green” (that means 75% carbon, such as dry leaves, to 25% nitrogen, green or wet stuff such as vegetable peelings) you can achieve most respectable compost.  Pile stuff up and it will compost sooner or later, but we have found that if we turn our piles every two weeks, they become usable compost much faster. It seems the microorganisms that turn the ingredients into rich black dirt benefit from the added oxygen that turning and, thus aerating the piles, contributes to the process.

                                                 Tom Davis expertly manouvers the 

                                                      tractor to turn the piles of compost.

Robert and I have had a compost pile in our lives since the early 1970’s.  We put kitchen scraps into a bin in our backyard in Atlanta and did add some other yard trimmings and leaves on occasion.  But the scale of that endeavor was small and way more disorganized than what we are achieving here on Elm Street.  And ask either of my children what they remember about our composting in those days and I feel sure they will tell you what a hated chore it was to “take out the compost.”  “Phew! That stinks!” was the usual objection to the task of carrying the kitchen bucket of scraps to the compost bin and emptying it.   But we’ve come a long way from that and the smells around our Elm Street compost piles these days are mostly pleasant earthy odors. 

Cucumber peelings ready to go in the kitchen

compost bucket in the Elm Street kitchen.

All sorts of garden and yard waste goes into the making of our compost.  Spent plants can go directly into the compost.  I also now have three compost buckets near the kitchen sink.  One is for the materials that our chickens adore and consume readily; this includes greens such as blemished lettuce, watermelon rinds and other fruit discards which they adore, leftover breads (which they regard as real treasures and are most entertaining as they madly chase the first one to grab the treasured piece but who can’t eat it as she is too busy keeping it from the others) and more.  One bucket is for things such as onion peels (I don’t give it to the chickens on the theory that it might make the eggs taste oniony) and other stems and roots and citrus and banana peels that are not favored by the chickens.  The third bucket is for eggshells, which I grind up in a food processor (I think a great example of modern appliances meeting traditional practices) and add to the compost piles. 

I like the picture of Tom Davis here as he expertly drives the tractor to turn the piles.  Tom is careful and caring in all he does in the gardens and uses his skills with this machinery to execute another age old task with care and precision. 

So those are some of the matters about compost on Elm Street.  It really does make a difference in our garden and the plants we grow.  And I now enjoy my excursions to empty the compost buckets.  We’ve got it right at last.