Monday, September 12, 2011

Harvest Monday–12 September 2011

Bush beans

On Monday afternoon, the weather was good and I had a chance to spend some time in the garden picking beans and planting some more fall crops. The beans above are bush beans, both Provider and Jade. Most of these were blanched and frozen.

Blue Lake pole beans

These are the first of the Blue Lake pole beans, I lost a lot of the early beans from some kind of insect or disease. At first I thought that this was possibly insect damage, since the pole beans have been bothered by beetles, but now I am not sure it is insect damage and not disease.

UPDATE: This is apparently a disease called Halo Bacterial Bean Blight. I’ll post more details on what it is and what to do about it on Tuesday.

Halo bean blight on pole beans
This is a close up of the damage to the beans. These are some of the better beans. Some were so damaged they shriveled up and turned black. Anyone recognize this kind of damage? At first I thought it was insect damage, maybe Japanese beetles, but now I think it may be disease. A lot of the foliage is turning spotted and the growing tips are turning black and dying. This is disappointing because the pole beans took a long time to get to producing beans and we have weeks to go before first frost.

Tomato assortment

Not much is left of the tomatoes. Some Jet Star, Roma, and Sungold. The tomato on the right is a nice sized Cherokee Purple.

On Tuesday, a monsoon by the name of Lee arrived and we had several days of heavy rain. By Thursday, the garden was again flooded. It was worse than Irene, perhaps because the ground was saturated from the earlier storms. You can see the impact on the garden in my previous post. I had to go home and get some rubber boots so I could get around in the garden to harvest beans and tomatoes.

Tomatoes and peppers

Some tomatoes, Cubanelle peppers, and a poblano above.

Provider beans, broccoli, and a pepper

A bell pepper, broccoli and more bush beans, mostly Provider.

The rain moved out earlier than predicted and the last few days have been sunny. The tomatoes have lost most of their foliage and only a few green tomatoes are left. Maybe I should try pickling some tomatoes. But the cooler weather crops are perking up and my newly seeded lettuce and radish beds are up and growing. I have a second planting of sugar snap peas now about 6 inches high.

Collards

My third cutting of collards above, taken on Sunday. I could have cut twice as much, but I wanted to at least get the leaves shading the kale on the other side of the bed.

Pole beans

I got a pretty good picking of pole beans Sunday, with less of the damage to the beans pictured above. But the foliage continues to wilt.

Chard, beans, herbs and tomatoes

An assortment of vegetables, including a few more chard leaves (the lacy one is artfully tucked underneath), bush beans, broccoli, herbs, and a few tomatoes. And tucked in among the pole beans was another cucumber from one of my long-dead cucumber plants. This one was attached to a vine that looked like it was greening up and starting to grow again.

To see what others are harvesting, go on over to Daphne's Dandelions

8 comments:

  1. Fabulous harvests. I love Jade beans although I always have problems with germination rates - I do think they taste great though.

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  2. Not sure what is happening with those beans. Not like any disease I have dealt with in the bean patch before and it does have potential to be either insect damage or potentially a disease.

    Good harvest this week - the other beans are looking tasty!

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  3. Great harvest! Not sure what's happening with your beans but I do love all the green! Congrats!

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  4. Great harvest! I've never seen bean damage like that before. Based on the discoloration, I would say it was a disease of some sort.

    Nice looking batch of collards! Our fall greens are really suffering right now from slugs, cabbage worms and leaf miners.

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  5. Liz, I like Jade a lot but had the poor germination experience you had. I use the Square Foot Gardening technique of planting in squares so I just pushed in new seeds where plants didn't emerge. The developer of Jade has a new bean called Fresh Pick that is an improved Jade. Not better germination necessarily, but pods are plumper, darker green, and have better flavor. I may try that next year.

    Thomas, I used floating row cover over the collards and kale into August to ward off the cabbage moths. It seemed to work. I still had slugs get under the cover but Sluggo fixed that. But leaf miners are tough. Fortunately no leaf miner damage this year, although I think we had every other pest known to gardeners.

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  6. I'm still very envious of your pole greens, last year i grew some dwarf variety this year sadly none. I must sadly resort to supermarket ones to eat this year :(

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  7. Dave, I had similar damage on my Provider bush beans after they had been bearing awhile. The last picking about 2/3 of the beans were too damaged to use, and I pulled them up as they were about finished anyway. At first I thought it was from the bean beetle as they will chew the beans somewhat but mostly they eat the leaves. On a later planting of beans I found a very small caterpillar in one of the chewed out sections. If it is a caterpillar it can be controlled by Bt. It's annoying to lose a good bean to damage like this. Mike R.

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  8. Mike R., thanks. I considered bug damage, and the bean on the bottom has a round hole that is probably caterpillar damage. But the rest of the damage is irregular with black edges. I finally identified it as halo bean blight and have more details on it on my post of September 13. The pole beans are now completely dead and all remaining beans are unusable. It has now spread to my bush beans. I have a big cleanup task ahead of me to collect and dispose of all the diseased vegetation. All because I grabbed a pack of seeds at our local farm stand.

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