Gardeners' Holidays: Late Harvest

Well, production in the garden is slowing down. The tomatoes have tapered off, although we're still getting an occasional pepper (particularly off our new Carmen plant, which has proved to be tremendously productive). We've harvested four butternut squash so far (three Waltham and one Ponca Baby), and there are four more out there left to pick. We still have lima beans to harvest, though not an impressive amount of them. And since there's been no frost yet, all the herbs in our herb bed are still in good shape. In fact, the plants are so big that I've taken to harvesting them for flower arrangements.

The big surprise, for this time of year, is that we're still getting green beans. Normally, the harvest has completely dried up by this time of year—and indeed, the green bean variety we actually bought (Provider) has stopped producing. But somehow, in amongst the Provider beans in the packet, there must have been one rogue bean of another variety. While the Provider is a bush bean that produces compact, clumpy plants, this mystery bean sent out a long tendril that snaked its way right up the trellis where the snow peas used to be, and spread until it covered half the trellis.

Brian didn't know what to make of it, but he let it be, and about a month later—right as the Provider beans were ending—it suddenly started to produce beans. These looked nothing like the beans we'd been getting off the Provider plant, which were long and round in shape; these were much shorter and flatter, and they cooked up nice and tender. And they just kept coming, all throughout the fall: over two pounds of them so far, from just one plant. The last few Brian picked were a little tougher than the rest, so it looks like these mystery beans may be coming to an end, but that's still a pretty impressive harvest for something we never actually intended to plant.

This bean's production and flavor were so impressive, and having fresh green beans all autumn long was such a treat, that we'd like to plant some more of them next year (on purpose this time). The only difficulty is that, since this bean just kind of showed up in our garden, we're not sure what variety it is. We know it's a pole bean, and it produces purplish blossoms and flat, tender, string-free beans that keep coming well into autumn. Based on an article in The Spruce, we guessed it might be a "Climbing French" bean, and the picture on the Seed Savers site looks right, so our best bet would be to buy a packet of these, plant some along with the Provider beans, and hope for the best. Unfortunately, Fedco doesn't carry them, so we'll have to try to pick them up somewhere else, or else move our entire seed order for the year to another company.


For now, we enjoyed what may be the last of these beans for this year on Halloween night, along with a butternut squash pizza with sage and some apple crisp for dessert. The pizza recipe only uses a little bit of squash, so we've got some left over to try a recipe out of the October edition of Savory, which you'll probably be seeing soon as our Recipe of the Month for November.