Last Sunday I spent a good deal of time on yard work.

I managed the following:

The evil rose bush was in fine bloom. It needs to be chopped down to size so it doesn't take over the yard.

Here's how to make my favorite green beans since I just made some and realized why I love them again

Get yourself some green beans. Not the canned ones (although those are a comfort food in their own right), fresh green beans. I got mine from my garden, but they're probably in grocery stores too

Wash, cut off both ends, and then you're ready to go. Mine were blanched and frozen after this because I harvested them a few months ago, so if that's the case then thaw them.

Melt some bacon grease/butter in a pan that you can comfortably fit your beans in. I usually start with bacon grease and then add butter when it dries out, but do what you want

Add the beans!! I usually season with lemon pepper, seasoned salt*, onion powder, and garlic powder (ABSOLUTELY recommend btw) but most combos work

Cook on a medium heat until they get floppy and a bit brown, replace your bacon grease/butter when you need to, and that's it. I usually plate with a bit more butter and parmesan cheese, but they would be good without

*don't add too much salt in the beginning! Bacon grease, butter, parmesan all add salt

I absolutely love these, and they're pretty easy to make. I also recommend that if you serve with mashed potatoes to add a bit of garlic powder into those too, just to give them a little more oomph

Growing beans is so nice and good!! That's not why I made this post, but they're probably the best plant in my garden. They're pretty versatile too, if you don't have a lot of horizontal space you can grow pole beans, or vice versa for bush beans. Personally I prefer bush beans, but both have a great harvest and produce throughout the entire growing season.

Some of my Yellow Cherokee Wax BUSH beans have decided to become POLE beans instead and start climbing up structures.

Todays bean harvest! The bean plants really just took off all the sudden recently!

I ended up with a lot of mixed-food jars, with a lot of dry beans misplaced in there, so today I figured I would take it all apart, sort the dried food, and make a record of how much beans I managed to grow in a fairly small growing area.

I did it on my bed as usual, and it was a lot of fun sorting it all out! You can see dried tomatoes, kohlrabi, carrots, zucchini, parsnip, and a whole lot of bean varieties.

My absolute favourite were these little purple beans, they're soo beautiful. I can't figure out where I got these, but I will grow more of this. I also liked to see all these different piles of beans, that is a great storage food to grow!

Now, for the research part. Do you see these two biggest piles of beans, green and brown ones? This is what I wanted to compare, because I intentionally planted a very similar amounts of these, but the brown ones are a tall (pole) variety, and the green ones a short (bush) variety. Generally short varieties give out less produce, yet in the piles, you can see there is more of the green ones!

I also went out of my way to create a hand-made scale (here's a link to how that's done), to see the difference in weight, and found I had 216g of the brown beans, and 235g of the green ones. So I definitely grew more of the green ones, despite them being a less productive variety.

I don't think this is proof that the green ones did magically better; they just did it faster. Short growing varieties create produce earlier, I was picking up short-variety beans before the tall variety even formed the pods. This also means they were less affected by the drought and the heat waves; in fact, they were done before the worst part even arrived. A lot of the tall-growing bean pods ended up failing due to the heat and the lack of water, so they would have produced more if the year was any better.

This is a really good piece of knowledge to have! If you plant bush-variety beans, you're much safer to actually get the harvest despite bad weather conditions, but it's still good to plant the pole variety, because if the weather is good, they'll give you more beans! I'll plant all of these varieties again.

My last task was to pick the best, biggest and shiniest beans from every variety, and I packed them into my seed packages, to plant in the spring. I'm looking forward to eating all these dried foods, I haven't actually tested most of these in recipes, I was only thinking of storage. I'll report my cooking results too!