Garden Journal 2011 {Green Beans}

Our neighbors have a huge palo verde tree on the perimeter of their yard.  The branches hang over onto all three of their neighbor's property.  This tree drops spider mites into my garden and cause me grief year after year.  Usually it starts slowly and by July when I just can't bare to keep up the work of spraying them off, my plants become overtaken by their webbing and croak.

They came early this year.  Just as the plants were getting established they decided to do some major tree trimming.  There is no way to cut the branches hanging over our yard when the garden is all planted out.  However, the agitation of the tree must have caused these mites to fall like they have never fell before.  My tomatoes, zucchini and green beans were hit hard.  While I have gotten only a few tomatoes and no zucchini, the green beans still produced really well even though the plants looked terrible.

I planted two - eight foot rows this year, each row I planted 6 weeks apart.  One mid February and the second at the beginning of April.  The timing was perfect, just as the first row was petering out, the second were coming into production.  I have not been bean-less in the past 3 months! In fact, I have had more than we can handle, 5 lbs a week gets to be a little much week after week.  I crammed as many as I could into yummy dishes like this Garbanzo Bean Curry and my own Salmon Pasta.  I gave some away, but boy was that hard after all the work that went into those babies!

After a few times of having over 5 pounds still in the fridge, going out to pick and pulling back the leaves to find a jungle of full grown beans, I decided to knock out some jars in the canner.  I generally hate frozen green beans, but I am thinking that I might make a huge batch of the green bean curry and see how that freezes.  Any other suggestions?
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