Adventures in Green Beans

We had our first pickin' of green beans last weekend.
Our dogs, Louie & Otto, wanted to help us. Actually they wanted to sneak green beans & eat them. Here's Louie, pretending he's just relaxing & keeping watch while we're picking. He would get up & sneak a bean out of our boxes, & then go hide behind the onions (right behind him in this picture) to eat his bean. He thought we couldn't see him behind those onions! LOL

After 3 hours, here's what we picked.

My husband lit up our burn pile ( just various limbs & stuff that we burn every once in a great while) & we sat around a campfire for many hours, just breakin' beans & eating s'mores.
In this picture, you can see that Louie is gaurding the boxes of beans. He's pretending that he's just relaxing with his ball, but everytime I looked over at him, he had moved just a little closer to the beans. He was just waiting for us to not look at him so he could sneak another bean. LOL
And here are both of our gaurd dogs (bean gaurd dogs! LOL) on duty. Otto's snout looks funny in this picture...that's because he's eating a green bean!

I started canning late, WAY too late in the day for this big mess 'o beans. I put the first load in the canner about 3:00pm.
This is the first canning load of the season!

This was a beautiful sight... but by the early morning hours, quite frankly, I was getting a bit tired of it! LOL
We had so many beans, that for the first time in my life, I didn't finish canning them. I couldn't go on. At 5:50AM I took my last load off the burner. I drained the sink full that I still had in the sink, put them in big pans, put them in the frig, hoped for the best & went to bed. I had canned 70 quarts of beans.
Bless my dear husband's heart, I woke up at 10:30am (hey, I got 4 1/2 hours of sleep!) & he was finishing up canning the last of the beans! He canned 20 quarts, so our grand total for this pickin' was 90 quarts!
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Here they are, all ready to be stored for the winter.

I had to find storage place for them quickly...to make room for my zucchini. LOL
You can see just some of those hiding behind the beans.
To be honest, we should have picked the weekend before, but we were just so busy with things that we couldn't do it. Then we weren't able to do it through the week, so it fell to last weekend. The unseasonably cool weather saved us on this one, because if it were as hot as it usually is here in Indiana in August, those beans would have been spongy if they'd been left on the vine too long. Normally, we would have had our first pickin' over a week ago & canned 40-50 quarts. Then picked again last weekend & got another 40-50 quarts. So really, this 90 quarts was 2 pickins' done at one time. LOL

Whew. It's a lot of work.
But it is very worth it.
I have been thanking God all week for this green bean harvest.

Now, I was hoping the corn would be ready this weekend, but it may be a few more days. And the tomatoes are coming on slowly, we get a few a day, but as soon as we have a few 90 degree days, we're going to have LOTS of them.

Canning Green Beans

We picked this wheelbarrow full of green beans on Sunday. It was our second pickin'.

It made 46 quarts!

I got to bed Sunday night, I mean Monday morning at 3:40!
But having these beans canned was sure worth it. :)
The next thing to be ready will be the corn.

GREEN BEANS!

We have green beans!

We are needing to weed the green beans, & you won't believe what our most prominent weed it right now.... volunteer tomato plants! We get so many every year. They have grown up right with the beans, & if you look close enough in this picture you can see them.

We just picked half a row of green beans this afternoon & this is what we have:

I wanted to fix them with our supper, & I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Something different...something I saw Claire do a while back. She ROASTED them. Here's the link to Claire's roasted green beans. (I didn't think to put onions in mine, I wish I would have done that.) We've grown green beans for years, & have had so many green beans, but I've never roasted them. And as much as we now love roasting cauliflower & asparagus in the oven, I just HAD to try roasting green beans.
We all liked them a lot! It made them different. We usually fix them the same or nearly the same way every time, which is in a pot with onions, potatoes, & some bacon grease (shhhh....don't tell).
Well this was different, & it was mighty good! Thanks Claire!!!

Roasted Green Beans
1-2 pounds fresh green beans
olive oil
salt & pepper

Wash the green beans & break off the stems. Pat dry. Place on cookie sheet & drizzle with olive oil. Salt liberally & add cracked pepper.
Place in 400 degree oven for 20-25 minutes, turning after 15 minutes.

I forgot to take a picture of my plate (way too anxious to dig in!) but here's the small amount of left over green beans we had with grilled pork chops that had been marinated in Dale's sauce. Thanks for that tip Ashley! We really loved Dale's on pork chops!
So it looks like we need to pick the one & a half rows of green beans in the next few days & get our first canning of the season underway. :)