Gardening

The garden we’re doing with friends is going great! We’re getting a lot of tomatoes (they didn’t ripen until quite late this year) now, and we just picked the last of the cucumbers.

We also just last week took down all the beans. We grew a LOT of beans. The process of taking down beans is not an easy one… *falls to the floor* …First of all, we grew the beans on strings that were tied to the top of the cold-frame. The vines of the bean plant wrapped and coiled around the rope and used that for support. So basically, they’re growing vertically and when you pick, you just pull the beans off the vine and get a ladder for the higher up ones. Secondly, after I went and cut down the top of all the ropes so that the beans fell to the floor, we had to pull off all the beans still attached (we eat or dry those). As soon as that was done, we had to unwind all the rope that the beans clung to as they grew (because eventually we’d give all the vines to our friends’ sheep and we didn’t want them ingesting/eating the rope.). So then load up all the vines and take them to the sheep…. that is the process of picking beans! It took a couple hours, this is how many beans we got when we were done.