#growing beans

So, I've been complaining about how slugs ate a part of my beans; since that day, I've been consistently walking to the garden, every single evening, and sometimes morning as well, and pulled the slugs out of my garden. It's been very rainy, and rain encourages and enables slugs, so for the first few days, the number of slugs has been in the low hundreds. On my 10x2meter garden. But, then it cleared up a little, and the numbers reduced to maybe 20-30 slugs a day! I felt like this slug season is nearing a close, and then, it stormed, and the numbers went right back up to several hundred.

Most of other gardeners have silently given up and introduced slug poison to their gardens, thus protecting their very small baby plants from the arms of hungry slug babies. I do believe that this encouraged every slug in the community garden, to come to my garden instead, which is filled with tasty strawberries and baby beans and has zero slug poison. And if they're caught in it, eating the plants, all that happens to them is they're relocated to the tall grass about a mile away.

I've managed to reduce the number a little, and then another downburst again, increased the number of slugs to hundreds a day. I have been fighting for dear life, readers. When I come to the garden, every baby plant inside of the garden has at least 2 baby slugs eating it. Every big plant has 3-10 of them. Even weeds. Yesterday, even every blade of grass around my garden had a slug on it. I am no longer a believer of my own methods, I think since I'm consistently taking them out, they believe that there's so much food for everyone, and keep reproducing, and keep making more, since there's no crowd whatsoever.

I've read somewhere that you can put a half of citrus skin in the garden, with a little hole in it. Then, a slug will slide inside, and feast on the sweet citrus flavour, and when the day comes, it's still dark in there, so they won't crawl out, and you can just take them and do with them as you please. Curious, I placed 2 citrus leftovers and put them around the garden like tiny slug houses. 1 single slug was caught in this trap. We are back to the planning board.

I do not know if this slug season will end, since the forecast is announcing, yet more rain, but my persistent efforts and sabotage of slugs wielded some results; some of my beans finally started to grow. The ones sown in thick strawberry patches did not make it, this originally genious plan did not come to fruition for me. Maybe it would work on a potentially dry year that does not produce thousands of slugs. I might attempt it again, when I have enough space to experiment, I still think it was a good idea. The beans around very spaced strawberry plants are starting to climb up!

Companion planting Beans - All beans and peas are members of the legume family. They all fix nitrogen in the soil that other plants may find beneficial. However this only happens after the bean plants have died and rotted into the soil. So companion planting beans with other nitrogen greedy plants is detrimental to both crops.

Never grow any Alliums (onions, garlic, leeks chives etc...) near beans as these are nitrogen hungry plants and will compete with the beans for nutrients resulting in poor crops from both.

Also keep peppers and chillies away from beans because of the threat of the Anthracnose virus for more information see full post.

Having said that there are plants that will be advantageous to plant with beans.

Grow summer savory, nasturtiums and rosemary along side beans to deter the bean beetle.

I learned some new things about gardening due to neglecting it for 3 months; most of it is related to beans. I noticed that people were hasty to harvest their dry beans as soon as it started raining; I supposed it was bad for dry beans to be in a lot of rain, they might rot or something. I got to harvest mine way late, so I found out; what actually happens when you leave your dry beans outside after summer, and it rains a whole lot, and then a whole lot more?

The answer: They sprout. And I don't mean they fall down to the ground and start growing new plants, they sprout even while they're still hanging off of the plant! Just look at these:

Still in their pod and sprouting!

This was a lot of fun to find out; I'm not upset by this, as it's not the majority that sprouted, and I can simply eat them anyway, sprouted food is healthy! Here's all of those who sprouted, ready to be cooked:

And they tasted only slightly different than the other dry beans, they were great to eat!

The rest of my beans have happily cross-pollinated, now they're all possible sizes and colors and I could not be happier about that. Looking at the colorful bean collection makes me feel like my life is happy, enriched, filled with wonder and variety. Look at these:

Some of the beans I was picking up were in the big, still-green pods; that meant they're unripe, but we weren't getting any sun, and they wouldn't get to ripen more, so I harvested them anyway. Upon opening them at home later, I was greeted with the most gorgeous beans I've ever seen in my life. I've been entranced. Look at this:

If I told you these were magic beans and tried to trade them to you in a small village's farmer's market for something valuable, would you not take my word for it? They're the colors of the universe, light blue and purple and some even have slight brushes of color on them like they're painted. I've been staring at these lovingly for 2 days, and then I had to cook them, because they're unripe and can't really be stored as long as the dry beans can. I made them into a white soup, together with potatoes and chive infusion. They don't completely lose their color in a soup either! They just get a bit more grey:

I noticed my bean plants have lots of pretty pink-ish flowers and purple pods!

But then I also found one pod that felt completely dry to my fingers, I can't imagine it being more dry than it is. I couldn't resist it, so I took it down and opened it to see what's inside.

They're beautiful and look completely ripe! If I can actively pick off dry beans out of the plants during the season that is a huge benefit! I will collect these in a jar until I have enough for a meal.

On a more ridiculous note, I had my chinese noodle-beans accidentally cross-pollinate with low-growing green beans. And this created... a low-growing plant that stil grows long-ass noodle beans except now they drag all over the floor. I laughed when I saw it.

been a few days, so here we are!

I SAID LOOKIT MY BEANS GROWING, BOY!!

again, this was an experiment where we took a bag of 15 bean soup, soaked about half of it overnight and then spread them on and in some soil -

the bag was less than $4 - a massive bargain compared to paying $2-4 for a seed packet of judt 8-10 beans for planting <w<

the only thing in the bag we couldn't grow were the split peas - cuz they are split. 😂

anyhoo, HAPPY FOOD GROWING PPL