She Brings Me Water
An aeclectic look at the nearby worldArchive for August, 2007
BYOB
Bring Your Own Butter
Gourds and Lima Beans
The corn is all picked, and shucked, and waiting in the freezer to be eaten. We’ve given away some of it to family and friends. There are still some green beans drying on the vines, they got too big to be good eating but some of their younger siblings are also cooling their heels in the freezer. A sad story concerning the lima beans: we started picking them last week, when we had a good sized bag I shelled them all, steamed them, seasoned them with butter, lemon pepper and garlic powder and- they were not good. They were tough and had a sort of metallic taste. Our gardening neighbor had gotten us this bag of beans to plant from Southern States, an agricultural supply store, where he gets some of his seeds, and on the bag it said “Not for human consumption”. We assumed that referred to the dried beans in the bag, not the product of planting the beans, but maybe we were wrong.
So, lessons learned for next year:
- Choose our seeds earlier and with more attention, maybe choosing from seed catalogs so that we can get types more in keeping with the Native American tradition?
- Four bean seeds per corn mound is too many, if all the seeds sprout and aren’t eaten by critters. We had to stake some of the corn stalks to keep them from being pulled down by the vines.
- There is not enough space in between the corn and bean mounds to plant the squash (here’s a link to the spacing guidelines we followed). The spaces between need to be bigger or space needs to be set aside just for the squash. Or maybe alternate planting beans and squash in the corn mounds, instead of only beans?
The gourds were all volunteers that we transplanted from near the house, they did really well and we have gourds drying in three places: on our screened porch in an old dish-drying rack; outside on a screen; and in our greenhouse on a larger screen. The reasons for three different drying places are: 1) there are too many of them to be all in one place; and 2) this way we can see what is the best method of drying them. Very scientific.
Who was that Masked Man?
That was no man, that was a raccoon- or two, or three. They caused the above damage, and much more too. When we planted this Native American garden, the book we got the plan from said to plant enough to share with the wildlife that will surely be attracted to your lush, green and tasty plants. Okay, we had plenty, enough to share. But what the book didn’t say was that the wildlife wouldn’t just come in, take a few ears, thank us and leave, they’d come in, tear open unripened ears looking for the ripe ones, tear down stalks looking for more ripe ones, and destroy the stalks that the beans need for their support- no wonder they wear masks.
Our neighbor, the one that has done a large garden for seven years now, put out a radio to scare the raccoons (and deer) away, and he said it worked as long as the batteries didn’t run out. So we put out a radio, which seemed to work except for the areas of the garden far away from the radio, so we put out another radio, so that more of the area of the garden is blanketed with a barrier of sound. Nocturnal animals use sound as a powerful guidance system (that’s why a lot of them have such big ears); they also use scent, to guide them and warn them of dangers, so to take advantage of that, we are collecting our urine and pouring it around the garden at night. Both methods seem to be working and we are glad to have found ways to discourage the animals without harming them.
And we are picking, as the ears are ripening very fast now, especially the Ruby Queen. Here’s me and our cat Junior and some of the harvest:
Junior helps by rolling in the dirt, he says it keeps down the weeds.
The package of Ruby Queen seeds showed a completely red ear of corn, all the kernels, not just some like the Indian corn you see in grocery stores around Thanksgiving. Ours were not all red, but having silver and yellow corn growing near it, it probably cross-pollinated with the others. So we have red kernels mixed with silver, some all silver, some all yellow, and some mixed yellow and silver. We had some last night for dinner, steamed for about 10 minutes, then eaten with butter, salt and pepper. It was very good.
