It is the Time of Strawberries again and I am spending several hours daily picking, sorting, and processing strawberries.

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However, since we still did not eat half! of the various strawberry, figs, and other jams and marmalades that we made last year, I have decided to try and use the fruit dehumidifier on them.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I was worried a bit they will lose aroma and/or color, but neither happened. They are still bright red (that might still change over time) and very aromatic. Enclosed in jars they should hold for years in our cool dark cellar. And unlike marmalade – which is way too sweet for me to eat regularly – I can add them to my breakfast yogurt together with other dried fruits from our garden (prunes and apples) almost daily without adverse effects, so they should disappear over time hopefully quicker than the marmalade (which we cannot manage to give away, let alone eat). Even running 24/7 at 60°C, the dehumidifier cannot manage to dry all strawberries that I gather daily and the smaller and unseemly fruits still have to go into marmalade, which thus will continue to accumulate. Next year I will plow over some of the strawberry patches, this is simply too much.

Blast it. I wish that more useful and edible foodstuffs grew here as well as strawberries and walnuts. I had no luck with sweet corn or red beets this year, most seeds did not even germinate. With garlic and onions, I had zero luck for several years too. And this year’s pole beans were partially destroyed by voles and partly by the too-harsh sun (although I still have enough plants to hope for a reasonable harvest), and my only apple tree appears to be dying from water vole damage. And those little fuckers ate all of my tulips as well, so I did not even have pretty flowers in the spring. I still had no luck in finding a remedy that works on these pests.

Our south wall used to be shaded by a rabbit shed, later converted to a chicken hoop. Ever since I demolished that, the sun was directly blazing at it. It does not heat the house much because it is well insulated, but I felt somehow that the space is wasted. After some thinking, I have decided that it would be an ideal space for growing runner beans, one row, close to the wall. Runner beans do not mind the low-quality soil, so they do not need to be fertilized and thus there is no risk of polluting our well which is down the slope exactly on the opposite side of the house.

Last year was somewhat poor, the beans did not grow that much. There was enough rain, but not enough sun for them to really prosper. Even so, the harvest was big enough that we still did not eat it all.

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This year the weather was extremely hot and dry again. However, we managed to collect enough rainwater in the spring to be able to water the beans the whole time sufficiently, so they prospered enormously and covered the whole wall.

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They are still blooming and they will continue to grow until the first frost.  I will probably wait for two more weeks, then I will harvest all green immature pods and clip the plants so they do not waste energy on growing and instead mature the remaining pods quicker. But maybe I won’t bother. The harvest looks extremely promising even so, I will have to convince my mother to cook beans more often. I like them better than chicken anyway.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

I am thinking about buying seeds of other vine beans and planting them next year en masse on the vegetable patch where this year grew potatoes. But I like runner beans the best because they are big and thus they require the least work per weight when shelling. We used to have white runner beans too, but  I haven’t seen them in shops for a long time. I could not put seeds consistently aside, because the white and red beans hybridized and after two-three years I had neither white nor purple beans but a mish-mash.