Potatoes and Beans

I started digging potatoes yesterday morning:

We have a good crop this year. I dug out some Yukon Golds the size of softballs. Yukon Gold and Classic Russet make up the bulk of what we eat, but there are also some Butter Reds and a few Purple Vikings in there, too. I’ll dig them all and then sort into burlap bags for storage. The Yukon Golds need to be eaten first as they don’t store well long-term.

That area of the garden is between the raspberries and the lavender hedge, and it’s going to be where I put the strawberries next year. That way, all the berries will be in the same area of the garden. The husband dumped a load of compost in that spot last fall and the potatoes were mulched with straw, so by the time the straw breaks down over the winter, the soil should be well amended.

Our friend Anna, who has a catering business, ordered green beans for me from one of her local suppliers. I didn’t grow any this year, but they will be on the list for next year. She dropped off 10 pounds of beans for me the other night and those turned into 16 pints of French-style green beans yesterday. Elysian had gotten me a green bean cutter for my birthday and I wanted to try it out:

I am on the fence. This is a sturdy little gadget—cast iron—but it needs to be clamped to something. I can’t clamp it to either my countertop or the kitchen table, so I used the wooden stand that came with my apple peeler. I had to put the stand on top of a book, though, to get the cutter high enough off the table. It was not the most stable of arrangements. Also, you can’t do more than one or two beans at a time or the cutter jams. It was slow going.

I did the first five pounds and processed them, and while the first batch was processing, I did the other five pounds. My big pressure canner holds 19 pints; I could have done all 16 pints at once, but it worked well to do them in two batches. They only have to process for 20 minutes, so I wasn’t waiting forever between batches. (Dry beans, in contrast, have to process for 90 minutes, and the canner takes a long time to cool down enough to open.) I was taking the second batch out of the canner and making spaghetti for dinner just as the husband was pulling in to the driveway. Sixteen pints are ready for the pantry:

I may still take my friend Marcie up on her offer to get green beans from her garden, but I probably won’t french those unless I can rig up a better system. I saw that another blogger had clamped her slicer to a wooden barstool and attached a bowl beneath it with a bungee cord, so I might try that. Also, according to the Cuisinart website, I should be able to slice beans horizontally using the food processor—and my new one is here and ready to use—so that’s another possibility.

If you don’t try, you won’t know.

I was hoping to unbox my new LEM dehydrator and get it up and running yesterday, too, but I didn’t get to it. I have an American Harvester dehydrator which works fine for a lot of foods, but it’s round (a weird shape for drying things) and has no temperature control. I find it hard to dry herbs in that dehydrator without them getting cooked to a crisp. Susan has a LEM dehydrator and raves about it. She loves the stainless steel trays. I will be curious to see how it does with herbs. I would like to start drying more of mine for tea, especially as I was able to expand my patch of chocolate mint this year.

I’ve got to check the apples today. Lodi is an early pie variety and I suspect these may be earlier than usual this year. We’ll find out.