Dry Goods

The weather has been beautiful this last week (as long as you're not watering a garden!) - cool and dry, and great for curing the last of our corn, and a good bit of the beans.  I've also finally had a chance to dry some herbs, the overgrown basil in particular.

Our WWOOFers left this past week, but before they did we got the first serious picking of the dried beans done, and pulled the last of the corn.  Our mini-WWOOFer and Malachi actually shucked the corn all by themselves (Liam was sick and actually napped for 3 hours!), and it's been in the solar dehydrator for the last few days.  Today we had a record 6 Sewanee student helpers come out for a few hours, and - in addition to helping Caleb with the strawbale walls, and weeding the garden - they got the corn shelled out.  I weighed our year's harvest, and we have just over 20 pounds!  I grew 3 varieties this year, from left to right in the photo - Painted Mountain, Hopi Blue, and Floriani Red Flint.  I'm curious to see if there's any difference in the taste - the Floriani is supposed to be outstanding.  

I grew 4 varieties of shell beans this summer - left to right, Black Coco, Cannellini, Calypso, and Hutterite Soup - and some are faster-maturing than others.  The cannellini seems to be the slowest, and the Coco the fastest. So far, I have between a small soup-bowl and most of an economy-size coffee container of each.  It looks like they will all end up with about a coffee container-full, although the cannelini may be less.  I am most looking forward to the Hutterite - it's supposed to double in size when cooked, and make a nice, thick soup.  The Calypso is definitely the most striking, though, with it's black and white yin-yang coloring.  

All in all, I think our storage harvest has been pretty good this year.  The 20 pounds of corn should be enough cornmeal for a couple of years, I think, so I won't have to plant any next year.  That's what I aim for - I prefer rotating larger amounts of fewer crops, rather than trying to grow a little of everything every year.  The beans will be at least this year's worth - I'll probably need to grow them again next summer as well, but hopefully more of them.  This year I just did one small packet each, as a test-run.  

The sweet potatoes are looking to be a bumper crop as well - we snuck out a couple plants-worth the other day, and some of them are 3/4 of a pound!  I can't wait to dig them, we put in about 200 plants I think.  Between them and the winter squash, we're going to have an orange winter :)  In fact, I've started making squash pasta - more on that next time!