A Cooperative Learning Project
All four pole bean varieties were harvested this week (Sep 19).
Trionfo Violetto was the earliest to mature and is very prolific. The other three varieties took 2-3 weeks longer to mature, but were all harvestable around the same time. We noticed some thin rusty blemishes on some of the surface of the Blue Lake beans (seen in the close-up picture), but it’s not clear whether the blemishes are a concern.
One of our experimental crops this summer was Henderson’s Bush Lima Beans from Rohrer. They are described as a prolific heirloom variety with smaller 3-4″ pod.
By early August, the plants were loaded with flowers and beans and they can continue to produce for months until the first frost. Since they have a long growing season and pods can be at different stages of maturity, we weren’t sure how to decide on whether a pod was ready to pick or not.
The pods grow to about 3-inches long and seem to go through 3 stages once they reach that size:
1) relatively immature where the pod is full length, but it is still flat-ish and the beans inside are very small and difficult to shell
2) mature where the pod looks about the same size, but the girth fills out as the beans expand inside
3) dried.
The pods dry out on the plant surprisingly quickly, so the transition from mature to dried might happen in week or so. Some of the earliest dried pods we found had very small beans inside. It was discouraging at first because it seemed to suggest that the limas would be small, no matter how long we waited to harvest them. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case though. After a couple weeks of harvesting, the mature limas beans that we picked were larger.
With the first big lima harvest of the season, I decided to try sorting the beans as I shelled them to try to figure out what signs we could look for when deciding which beans are ready to pick. The biggest limas had a pod that felt full to the touch and I think the shell starts to turn a little paler green in color like the unshelled pods in the second column of this photo:
On the left are the dried beans. Those are easy to tell apart. In the middle are the mature beans. Most of the mature pods were plump to the touch. On the right are the less mature beans which were a deeper green on the outside. These took a lot more effort to get out of the shell and the beans inside were smaller and still a little green instead of the bright white color of the mature limas. It was tricky to tell some of these immature pods apart from the mature ones because the immature ones had also filled out, and were plump to the touch. I found the slightly yellow/pale color on the plump pods to be the best clues that the pod was mature and would shell easily.
Both the green and white limas tasted good. The main difference was the size of the bean and the effort to shell them.
Take way: Harvest pods when they are plump to the touch and the color is just starting to pale (lighter green).
In the end, I had a nice pile of shelled limas, some were big, others small; some had turned white, others were different shades of green:
I just boiled the limas and served them with salt and pepper. They all tasted pretty good, even the little green ones!
As for the dried beans, they were extremely easy to shell but there are only a few of them, so not sure how the dried ones taste yet. Interestingly enough, the dried beans seem to be a little smaller than the mature limas. Perhaps they shrink a little as they dry out?
Before transplanting
After transplanting (brassicas) and thinning (lettuce)
Second sighting of our resident praying mantis. It was resting upside down on the chives.
Praying mantis
High mowing suggests trimming onion seedlings when they reach 5" to make them grow thicker and stronger. We did not remember to trim them while they were growing under the lights, but decided to try a side-by-side comparison with some plants trimmed just after transplanting them in the garden.
Many of our transplanted walla-walla onions were very close to the recommended 5" height for trimming. I selected a 5×5 grid of the onions (out of the 14×5 grid of walla wallas planted) and trimmed the tops.
Below is a picture ot the allium bed before and after the trimming experiment — rows 3-7 from the back/right edge are the walla walla onions. Most of the walla wallas near the bottom of this picture were close to 5", so the grid of 5×5 walla wallas on the bottom was selected for the trimming experiment.
 Before trimming |
 After trimming |
Close up of one of the walla wallas before and after trimming — the leaf was trimmed from 7" down to a little over 1".
A few of the walla wallas in the 5×5 grid were almost double the height recommended for trimming because they had been seeded a week earlier. For the sake of uniformity, I trimmed these onions too, but left close to 3" of the onion top as opposed to 1-2" for the smaller ones. Below is an example of one of the larger walla wallas before and after trimming:
The trimmed onion tops caught up with the untrimmed tops quickly. By week 4, they were similar in size and it was difficult to tell them apart.
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Trimmed onions, Week 4 (May 20) |
Untrimmed onions, Week 4 (May 20) |
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Trimmed onions, Week 8 (June 17) |
Untrimmed onions, Week 8 (June 17) |
We harvested the onions on July 22. There still was no strong noticeable difference between the trimmed and untrimmed onions. Both conditions grew well and had good sized onions, but the trimming did not seem to give much, if any, advantage to the onions.
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Trimmed onions, harvest day (July 22) |
Untrimmed onions, harvest day (July 22) |
We planted two varieties of brussels sprouts this season: Churchill left-over from last season and a new variety Octia which we selected, in part based on a review of brussels sprouts from UNH cooperative extension. As recommended by that review, we topped both varieties to encourage a higher yield.
The mature plants were relatively easy to distinguish because Churchill has a redish tint to the stalks and leaf stems (lower left) while the Octia were pale green (upper right).
Another difference was the time to maturity. A few Octia sprouts were large enough to start harvesting in mid-September, while the Churchill sprouts were still very small. Now, in mid-October, both varieties have some harvestable sprouts, but the Octia has a much larger quantity of mature sprouts ranging from medium sized to very large. Churchill sprouts are small to medium. The picture below contrasts the number of Octia (left) versus Churchill (right) sprouts harvested on October 7th. Octia produced 4-5 times more sprouts than Churchill and some of them were very large.
One issue that we noticed with Octia at the start of the harvest was that the outer leaves of some sprouts were damaged (dead or possibly mildew?) and stunted growth. It was a small portion of the sprouts, but those affected by the damage were still edible after removing the outer leaves.
Some of the Churchill sprouts also had an odd elongated pine-cone shape to them instead of a more compact cabbage shape, but they still taste fine and mature to a medium size.
Overall, the Octia seems to be a good variety and is much more productive than Churchill; however, a portion of the sprouts were damaged and remained small. Another consideration for future brussels sprouts varieties in the garden is that the Churchill variety was not offered by Burpee or Johnny's Seeds for the 2016 season, so it is not clear whether Churchill will be available for next season.
On another note, we have been very fortunate to have very few aphids on either variety of brussels sprouts this year! Aphids were one of the major challenges we faced with the brussels sprouts in the past two years.
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