Purple Podded Pole Beans

Whoa, I didn't know I had vegetables ready for eating yet!  I had been so focused on the sad, unproductive tomatoes/pumpkins/zucchini that I didn't notice these shadowy pods lurking beneath their foliage.

Soooooo pretty....

These things are delicious!!  They're green inside and lose the purple if you cook them, so I just ate a few raw.  I know I've mentioned the superior taste of home-grown peas before... just like the peas, these purple "green" beans are equally tastier and juicier than their supermarket green bean counterparts.  I had grown some blue lake pole beans (a traditional green bean) in pots last year, and they don't compare in taste to these more vibrant heirlooms.  I suppose it's a blessing that my blue lake beans didn't do well and that I had to replace them with something new from rareseeds.com.  A review on that website says that they'll save the extra pods at the end of the season and let them dry, and the dried beans make for delicious soups all winter too.  Yum!  We'll probably eat all of them raw, but I will save a few seeds anyway... since it's an heirloom, I'll be able to start new plants next year for free.

Even if they don't produce a lot this summer (I did give them a pretty late start since the blue lake beans didn't work out), I will definitely have them in the garden next year too.  They're climbing the trellis really well, and they've been easy, with a very high germination rate and producing very vigorous seedlings that needed no special attention.  And let's face it, in such a small backyard, vertical is the way to go!

Can't wait until my husband gets home from his trip... it'll be hilarious to surprise him with the vibrant beans!

What're the most oddly-colored veggies in your garden?

Wow, what a heat wave!

After all this rain I can tell it's summer finally... the sun is beginning to exert its dangerous forces on my parched little garden.  Two of my maples were burned, and one of them only had 3 leaves left.  I moved them to under the edge of the wisteria-covered porch where it's shadier and less windy, and have been a bit more attentive to watering.  I was pretty worried, but they're bouncing back.

The littlest maple made lots of buds right away!  It probably helped that I added some fish fertilizer.

The peas had browned quite a bit while I was away on vacation, and I was waiting to see if the hints of green meant life was still there... but they were fully dead within a week.  It's just too hot, and peas are a cold-weather plant.  Somehow this year I ended up with hardly any peas, maybe 30 out of 10 plants, but the vines were incredibly vigorous and had actually reached the top of the trellis, leaned over, and started to twine around the apple tree.  Last year with the same amount of plants in the same size pot, I was getting 5-8 peas a day for weeks, and the plants only got 2/3rds of the way up the same trellis.  The changed location is definitely making me change the way I've container-gardened in the past.

Though the peas are gone, the green beans are just getting started!

After living in the bay area for so many years, I'm not used to temperatures up in the 90's.  But it does feel good having more blatant extremes of weather, it makes me more aware of the seasons and time's progress.  And the heat of the season is made all the more enjoyable because we have air conditioning now!