well some of our fall crops are just now starting to produce and today i want to show you what we've
been picking so right here we've got what i have appropriately deemed as the bean jungle
we got three rows of pole slash runner beans in here in the middle we've got our slowest to bloom
which is these christmas lima beans but you can see there we're starting to get some blooms on
these grown these many years and they always seem to take longer than most bean crops to
start blooming but once they do you better watch out we got nice foliage there
and um we'll just patiently wait until we start getting some nice delicious lima beans
should have some just in time for thanksgiving i would imagine over here we've got a rattlesnake
beans and these are the first to produce of the three we've got here we can see
blooms on there now the bloom production kind of halted a little bit we had a little cool
spell come through and these guys are just kind of in a state of staying put
but we got some more warm weather on the way and i imagine we'll start seeing another surge of blooms
here in a minute you can see the bees there love these flowers always fun to
come out here see the bees enjoying some nice nectar there from all these pole bean flowers
and i just picked these yesterday and i'll show you my harvest in a minute but we can see some
small ones on here i picked them pretty clean but there's one right there nice coloration on that
one there's some more small ones right there we picked most of the big ones to medium-sized ones
out of here yesterday picked this entire row so let's go take a look at what we picked yesterday
and talk about these rattlesnake beans a minute so this is my harvest from yesterday i picked an
entire picking bucket full of these rattlesnake beans and i've already got them in bags here i
split them up into four bags we can eat some give some away we just use these bags here like you
get the grocery store produce style put them in there tie them up poke a few holes in them
and they store in the fridge really good like that so that's about how much i put in a bag
get these out of the way i got one bag busted open here so we can see what they look like now
this size right here is about as big as i like to let them get i've seen where some people will
let the beans fill out completely let them get kind of naughty and harvest them then
but i try to get them all before they get too big this is probably
ideal size you can see it's kind of a flattened bean once it gets larger
and the striations which gives it the name rattlesnake bean can vary a good bit we can see
on these two here and get them situated just right so one of those you can see really
pronounced purple striations the other one you can hardly see them at all and some of these beans
don't really have any markings on them and that's just because it's an heirloom variety
you'll see a lot of natural variation there a lot of times that color will go away once you
cook them anyhow but it is nice and pretty to look at there now when we pick them
we try to do what we call pick them clean that's what mom always told us to do growing up so we'll
pick even some of these small ones right here and even though we'll snap these bigger ones just put
them in some boiling water with some bacon grease or ham hock some of these smaller ones here we'll
cook those whole we can put those in the air fryer roast them in the oven on a pan get them
nice and crispy they're really good that way nice looking beans here don't look stung up at all
nice good little harvest there now i had a lady the other day comment on one of our social media
posts and say that she didn't like rattlesnake beans because they got all stringy on her now
i've told you this before on some of our other videos i don't really understand this string bean
thing why people want stringless beans and all that i've never had any issue with having any
strings in my beans these things are nice and crispy i don't really feel any strings there
but i have heard from some other people and what they tell me is if you let the beans get real
big then you can have some issue with what they call strings i guess where they it's where they
get the name string beans anyhoo i think the easy solution that is just to pick them
before they get real big i guess if you let them get real big most any bean will have a string on
it i don't think i've ever eaten a bean where a string got stuck in my tooth but evidently that's
a problem for some folks but i would just say pick them small pick them small nice and tender
you won't have to worry about any strings so we took a look at those christmas llamas they're just
starting to bloom took a look at our rattlesnake bean harvest now let's talk about these scarlet
runner beans right here and i showed you this on a previous video but these things have
the prettiest red kind of crimson colored blooms on them and when these things first start growing
they were just loaded with blooms at the bottom and now we're starting to get some blooms
over the top here probably with this warm weather coming we get some nice little second round of
blooms we got beans on the bottom here and i want to show you what those look like so right here
we can see a mess of them and uh these things can get pretty long let me grab this one some
of them get on six seven eight inches long and the beans are just now starting to fill out in
them you can see kind of little bumps there you can feel them starting to get some nice beans in
there uh i'm not sure if you could eat these like a normal green bean like those rattlesnake beans
just snap them and cook them haven't tried them like that i was more interested in growing out
the actual large beans inside of them and those look really cool let's go see what they look like
so here are some at various stages and not all of them get super long you see that guy's kind of
short looks like she's got one maybe two beans in there some of them get really really long
well that guy is about eight inches long and some of them it seems like the longer they stay on the
vine there the beans start to enlarge get mature you'll see this kind of red line or darkening
along the inside of the bean there let me shell one of these kind of show you what they look like
you see there nice pretty red bean let me open this one up all the way here
there we go so the seeds on these guys actually have little striations on them almost like those
rattlesnake bean pods and i imagine if you let them dry then you'll start to see some of those
these make some pretty good size a little red beans so far and i've snacked on a couple of these
and they're quite tasty so i think for these i'm just going to go for the beans here i'm going
to wait to these pods fill out a little more and probably just shell these guys now could you take
and snap this in right here and eat that i don't know maybe you could maybe we'll try that but
i'm not gonna harvest them all quite yet i'm gonna let them keep going
let these beans get even larger and uh i don't make a nice little meaty snack right there
now if any of you out there have ever grown these big old scarlet runner beans before let me know
how you like them you like to eat them with snap beans wait and let the beans get nice and big and
eat them more like you would butter beans i'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter now let's move
on over to the other side of the barn see what we got going on in this little plot back here so we
got our fall plot of sweet corn here that we had to kind of baby and rescue from when hurricane
sally messed up our germination pretty good we got tassels on there waiting for some silks to appear
so it should be another few weeks on that right there hopefully we can salvage a few ears from
that plot got a lot of inconsistent growth in there because when all that rain come through from
sally just affected our germination so some of them are a lot bigger than others not all of them
are tasseling at the same time but we'll salvage what we can but here's what i wanted to show you
right here so this is our row of tahama lettuce that we put in here after this
in row of corn just got washed away by sally and i remember when i did the video on planting these
guys some people said well one foot is way too far apart for this lettuce here if you can see there
it is filled in completely this variety here this tejama lettuce makes a nice big head it doesn't
head up like a romaine lettuce would it's kind of more leafy and these guys
will get even larger than this i've already harvested a few of them you can see right there
we just come through and get the biggest ones here and there and eventually knock out the whole row
now you don't have to harvest the entire head at one time if you just want a few little leaves of
lettuce for a sandwich or something you can come in here and just break that off and there you go
nice little piece for a sandwich or a blt or something so you don't have to harvest the whole
head at one time if you don't want to do that you just pick off leaves as you go and this thing will
keep growing up a little bit i really like this variety because it's heat tolerant it holds well
even with these crazy fluctuating temperatures we've been having where it's
40 degrees one day and 80 the next holds really well hasn't shown any signs of bolting yet
this head will get a good bit bigger probably you know on up around here if we let it go that far
well that's another nice thing you can harvest some of them small you don't have to harvest
them all at one time you can plant you a whole row and just eat them as you need them because
they're going to hold well now when i harvest the whole head what i'll do is i'll come in here
and i'll just cut it at the base just like that and unless you grow and let us in a high tunnel
where you're not getting any rain you're always going to get a little bit this at the bottom some
of these bottom leaves a little dirty so i'll just field dress them out here kind of shake the dirt
off and then you can take that inside there wash that up you can put a salad spinner and dry it
put a ziploc bag to keep for a few days so you can harvest your several heads at the time have
them ready to eat or just come out here and get one when you need it and down here in the south
here in zone 8b we can grow lettuce like that all throughout the fall and winter months so
we'll succession plant it i have some more that's you know probably three weeks in the ground
so far and we'll just keep planting lettuce every couple weeks that way we always have a
constant supply there it doesn't get cold enough here to really damage the plants
and we can have nice really tasty lettuce all throughout the fall or the cool months
so there's not an absolute heap of production in the garden right now
we'll be in a month or so but we are getting a few things some beans some lettuce nice home-grown
veggies to put on the table and i want to do more videos like this in the future a lot of
people have been asking for us to do more kind of harvesting videos showing when things are ready
we do a lot of planting videos we don't always do as many harvesting videos so hopefully everybody
enjoyed this one and as some of our other stuff gets ready our sweet corn our collards our kale
all that good cool weather stuff we'll be glad to show you that as well so let me know in the
comments below what you're harvesting in your garden right now and also let me know what
you think about this string bean deal have you ever had any issues with strings in your beans
i haven't seems like a lot of people have i'll put some links below to all the varieties we harvested
today so you can go check those out if you enjoyed this video make sure to give me a big thumbs up
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out these other two videos right here i think you really enjoy those as well we'll see you next time