I am eating well from the garden these days. This picture is what I had time to pick on Sunday. Please notice the three eggplants. Eggplant is my favorite vegetable, and once a year I have fried eggplant. Truly food of the gods. I generally don’t eat fried foods, but I make an exception to have fried eggplant. I could eat just eggplant for a meal. Or just that and fresh tomatoes. It would also be nice if I had some green beans to go with it, and some sweet corn. Fried eggplant, sliced tomatoes, green beans, and sweet corn. Yes, that truly would be a great supper.
My troubles with green beans continue. These are my pole beans pictured here. All leaves, no beans. I goofed somewhere, perhaps too much fertilizer?
Will I ever get beans from my garden? I tried bush beans and got one good sized bowl of them earlier in the summer and that was it. I think the rabbits either beat me to the beans, or the plants were so busy trying to recover from the rabbits eating so much of the tops off, that the plants didn’t have any energy left to actually flower and produce beans.
My plan with the pole beans was to protect the plants from the rabbits until they had a chance to climb up the poles. Hanging in the air like that, I figured that the beans would be safe. I didn’t plan for no flowers or beans.
But just like with corn (hey, I picked two more ears the other day, they are somewhere in that trug pictured above), I will keep trying with the beans, to keep the rabbits away and find a good variety that I can rely on. By the way, I planted two different varieties of bush beans in the same bed, but did not keep track of which row was which variety, so I don’t know which beans I actually was able to harvest! Drats! I also tried to get some beans going later on, but guess who ate the plants before they could even flower? If you guessed the rabbits, that would be correct.
However, things could be worse. I asked a colleague at work, who I know has a garden, how her garden was and she said terrible. She said her husband put Preen all around the garden, and she thinks it stunted the vegetables so they’ve harvested very little. But she laughed and said they also don’t have any weeds. Yes, it could be worse than having no beans.
Give me weeds and a good harvest any day. Keep those chemicals out of the garden!
Beautiful vegetables, can I come to your house to eat!
No chemicals- bad, very bad! But all your veggies look fantastic…So sorry about the beans…
What a harvest! Our garden has just started producing tomatoes, and lemon cucumbers. I guess we started too late. To busy selling other people their vegetable needs. We couldn’t plant till Mothers Day. I am determined to have a harvest like yours next year!
I agree completely about the weeds and chemicals. This is my first year for eggplant in Honduras. I tried Ping Tung Long, a Japanese variety, and it is producing heavily — much better than anything else I’m growing right now. It is so beautiful, too.
We sadly did not have good luck with our corn. The ears were short and nubby and then the squirrels got what they wanted. Our pole beans did poorly but considering how much rain we had, we were lucky to get a baggie full. I am still hopeful that next year we will learn from our mistakes. I got a seed catalog and am plotting now for spring!
Trey, I hate to tell you that I planted my vegetable garden the weekend AFTER Mother’s Day. I think the differences in our gardens is due to climate?
I will always plant a vegetable garden, even if I have a complete crop failure one year.
Beans – My pole beans failed this year through lack of water during our drought. But oddly my low bush bean did really well in much the same conditions.
Maybe your problem was lack of pollinating insects?
Too bad about your pole beans, but look at everything else you have! I too had problems with pole beans this year. In our part of the midwest (MN) we had no rain for several weeks in July with temperatures in the mid- to upper-90’s. I think when the temps got that high the vines stopped producing flowers, even though I kept up with the water. Just last week they started flowering again, so hopefully there will be more beans before the first frost.
Every year there’s a new mystery to solve in the garden – that’s what makes it so exciting!
John, hadn’t thought about lack of pollinators, that could be part of it.
Tracy, yes, I do have a lot that I AM harvesting!
Eggplant?! Oh wait, you mean Aubergine! Hehe. I will get around to doing that post about language differences soon.
Hmm, I don’t know what’s wrong with the pole beans. That type of bean is self-pollinating, so they don’t need insects … and if there aren’t any flowers they couldn’t do a lot of pollinating anyway. Too much fertiliser is a possibility if you’ve fed them with something high in nitrogen, because nitrogen encourages lush leafy growth at the expense of flowers. You could try feeding them with something seaweed based or which is designed for flowering plants (e.g. tomato fertiliser) … but to be honest I’m just guessing here.
Another possibility is that it’s a late-maturing variety and will start to produce flowers if you leave it a while longer.
Ah well, at least you have a beautiful basketful to be getting on with.