So Long, and Thanks for All the Beans

 

Earlier this week I joked that I was tired of gardening and wouldn’t much mind if everything froze. I was mostly kidding, but I got my sorta-wish last night when we had our first frost ten full days earlier than average (according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac). I went out today and picked three pale orange tomatoes, six small zucchini, and another bagful of green beans off of droopy, withered plants. Just like that, the garden’s done.

 

Every year provides different successes and failures, and every year I learn something new. At this rate I’ll be a master gardener by age 128. 😬This year’s hard lessons had mostly to do with tomatoes (hornworms, blossom-end rot, cloudy spots). 

 

The garden was fairly successful, though. One winner was green beans, which overcame early crop damage from bunnies that chewed right through the UTTERLY WORTHLESS plastic netting we bought as a chicken wire alternative. (Expensive mistake.) The beans rebounded; I froze several gallon bags of them.

 

I have no interest in canning, but I do like to “put up” extra vegetables in the freezer—and thanks to our generator, I know I won’t lose food in a power outage. Freezing is easier than canning, but being lazy, I wondered if it could be even easier. A few years ago I asked the internet, do I really have to blanch these green beans? Can’t I just freeze them raw? And the internet delivered. You can freeze them raw, but they should be used within about three months. Blanching the beans before freezing stops an enzyme process and allows for longer storage. Skipping that step shortens the beans’ freezer shelf life but greatly simplifies the preservation process, leading to less waste.

 

Green beans are one of the few vegetables we all agree on here; I am pretty confident we can get through them in three months.