I had planned to feature watermelon for yesterday but it turns out that I was premature in harvesting it and it was really not ripe enough to be dessert yet. Under-ripe watermelon is not a disaster, it’s really just a large juicy cucumber with a zillion seeds, but… well, I have been eating my fill of cucumber from the two very prolific plants in the greenhouse, so that wasn’t really best.
But we did eat some runner beans, in egg fried rice, for supper.
When I started gardening I had some difficulty with bean disambiguation, so here’s a very quick introduction to the ones I grow. There are three bean species that grow well in the UK: Phaseolus vulgaris is the common bean or French bean (and includes borlotti bean cultivars), Phaseolus coccineus is the runner bean, and then there are broad beans (aka fava beans), Vicia faba. Field beans grow here too but they’re really just broad beans with much smaller seeds (or rather, broad beans are really field beans with much larger seeds…). Common beans and runner beans are not frost-hardy, broad beans very often are, but they don’t usually like summer heat.
French beans can be climbing or bush/dwarf cultivars. I have a dwarf runner bean cultivar too, but those are comparatively rare, most runners are vigorous climbers. Runner beans will often perennialise: they make big old storage roots and will sprout from those the next year if they haven’t rotted out or frozen too badly. I usually sow some from seed anyway, but “it makes good storage roots that sprout well the next year” is one of my selection criteria. I’ve heard of an occasional vulgaris x coccineus cross but not (to my knowledge) grown one.
All of these beans can be eaten fresh in the pod, fresh out of the pod when they get a bit older, or dried when they get older still. Common beans have probably the most variety in terms of available cultivars. Both runner beans and common beans that are selected for drying use tend to be rather stringy and tough for fresh use, but there are some good dual-use beans out there. I actually really love drying beans, they are easy to grow, easy to process (and fairly forgiving with the timing on this), and taste much better than the ones from the shops.
I haven’t had good results attempting to grow lima beans (P. lunatus) in London. I haven’t tried to grow soya beans (Glycine max), though I’d like to at some point.
Other locavore food I ate yesterday:
cucumber
tomato
little tiny alpine strawberry while I was out in the back garden
mint
apple
pears
French beans, in my lunch — possibly the last of the year for fresh eating, oops
a few bites of underripe watermelon, sigh. I’ll get this eventually.