This is what standard runner beans from plants with red flowers look like:

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There is also a variety with white flowers and pure white beans. I tried to grow a few of those last year, but the germination rate was very poor, and I got barely fifty white seeds to plant this year, hoping to get more for the future. However, as readers will remember, last year I was growing the ordinary variety too, to fill the empty space due to the aforementioned poor germination of bought seeds. I was aware that I would get some hybridization, because I had that before. The result of hybridization last time was plants with half red, half white flowers, and seeds that looked just like the standard, except the pink/lilac colored parts were light brown/beige.
This year, I only planted white seeds, and I was surprised to get some plants with full red flowers from them. Well, I am even more surprised now.

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So far, I got a handful of “standard” lilac-black seeds, a lot of pure white seeds, and a bunch of pure black seeds. I have never seen pure black runner beans before, so I asked Google. Varieties with this color do exist, but on a cursory search, they are only grown in the UK and not sold in CZ.

Which is curiouser and curiouser. If I get enough black seeds, then next year I will sow only them, and we shall see what comes of it. I will probably have enough white seeds to save for the future. I also might try to grow all three varieties at once, each in a different part of the garden. That will reduce cross-pollination, but it will not eliminate it. It is a bugger. I wanted to grow two runner bean variants – white and red – in alternate years. And now I have one pure red strain in the cellar, white seeds that are somewhat unpredictable mongrels, and an intriguing new black variety that will probably throw some unexpected curveballs too.

I know that my pure red strain should remain viable in the jars in the cellar for at least two more years, so there is no big rush to renew those. I think I can afford to experiment. Especially since no matter what I do, the remaining beans will be perfectly edible. The worst that can happen is I won’t get pure color strains, but a technicolor seed roulette.

I harvested the third potato variety that I grew this year, and as the title says, I was disappointed.

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There were a lot of big tubers in there and an acceptable amount of small & tiny ones; the size distribution was not an issue. In fact, I could barely put aside 100 pieces of ~50 g seed potatoes for next year since most tubers were significantly bigger. I am still not fully decided if I will plant this variety next year, but since it does reasonably well in the Ruth-Stout method too, I am still considering it. If I decide against it, we can eat those taters too.

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The worse-than-expected problem was pest damage. Not only did I get approx. 9 kg of tubers damaged badly enough that they need to be processed asap; there were several spots with dead stalks above the ground, but no tubers underneath. They were all eaten by mice/voles. Based on how often that happened, I estimate the damage to be 10-15 kg, plus whatever we will have to cut and throw out of this bucket.

There is no late blight on the tubers; they look mostly reasonably nice and healthy. But the overall harvest was less than expected.

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I got circa 65 kg of tubers for storage. This is about the same yield per seed as what I got from Bellarosa and Camel, despite longer vegetation time. And I can confidently blame it all on effing rodents.

BTW, you can see a mouse trap under the weighed bucket. I’ve already caught two mice in my garden shed, and I’ll probably need to set traps more aggressively during the winter. A working cat would help a bit, but then I would need to buy feed for the cat, so the savings would be essentially nil.

Since I do not have much experience growing butternut squash, this is a new-ish problem for me. I have encountered this problem with some tomatoes, plums, and cherries, but I did not know it could happen with butternut squash too.

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Four fruits burst in the last week: two lengthwise, two across. The one in the picture broke almost all around; a centimeter more and it would essentially fall off.

I guess this is because the shell hardened prematurely in the heat, and then the fruit grew too quickly after the rain. I had to harvest this one prematurely, and I gave two others to my neighbor because they should be processed ASAP, and we cannot do that right now. The one that burst first has only a small crack that dried out, so I left it on the plant for now. But I will harvest and process it at the earliest possible time too.

I do not think there is anything I can do about this. Even if I watered the plants during the heatwave more than I did, it would not help; they could not take up the water during the day fast enough anyway.

The loofahs are a-growing. Yesterday, I counted 8 fruits, 7 of which can be found in this picture.

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Can you find them all? I made the picture larger than normal, so you have a chance to spot all of them. One is really hard to see, which is why yesterday was the first day I spotted it. The biggest fruit in this image is as big as my forearm and is starting to piss me off, because it is at the exact height where it is hard to see, but easy to boink with the head.

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The eighth piece is the first that started early in the summer. It is behind the door to the right and already drying out.

I missed several female flowers and did not pollinate them, but bees and wasps pollinated some of those. If all these fruits manage to ripen enough to be useful, I will be fully satisfied with this crop. Eight fruits should be enough compostable dish-scrubbers for at least two years.

Except I am the wrong gender, and I didn’t have a costume. And I was sorting peas of my own accord, not at the behest of an evil stepmother.

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I sorted undamaged and damaged peas. In the picture, there are approximately 3,25 kg of healthy-ish yellow peas in the jars. Healthy-ish because I am not entirely certain – some of them do have black spots, which might indicate there is a weevil pupa inside. The same goes for the 400 g of green peas on the right. And on the left are 200 g of badly damaged green peas. Not depicted is about the same amount of badly damaged yellow peas.

The healthy-ish yellow peas will be briefly frozen to kill any potential weevil pupae that might lurk in them. Then they will be used next year as either a pre-crop, companion crop, or even a main crop. To reduce weevil infestation, I will use a technique I read about on the interwebs and tested this year: staggered sowing. I will sow about a third as early in the season as possible and let them flower and fully fruit on some secondary plot. And about two months later, I will sow the main patch where I want them to grow for food. If I fail to grow food-grade peas, still no problem; they will be useful as green fertilizer even so.

The damaged yellow peas I have sown (together with some bad oats) in the raised bed where I had garlic this year. Some will decompose right away, but some will sprout and grow. Either way, they will serve as an organic fertilizer.

The healthy-ish green peas get the freezer treatment too, and they will be used to grow green peas next year as pre-crop with corn. The plan is to sow these as early as possible and harvest them as fresh green peas sometime in May, at about the same time that the Painted Mountain corn is supposed to be sown.

And the damaged green peas will be sown as green fertilizer now in the fall on the patch of land where I grew oats this year.

Another heatwave has hopefully ended, but the rains have not come yet; thus, I stood before the decision – to harvest the Camel potatoes before or after the rain.

Although the camel potatoes were not completely dry above ground, they were in the process of dying, so the tubers were no longer growing. For long-term storage, it is ideal to let the plants completely dry in the field so the tubers develop a slightly thicker and more resistant skin, but that has to be weighed against the fact that tubers grown in the Ruth Stout method are more susceptible to pest damage from both rodents and slugs. And the slugs are dormant right now, whereas they will come out after a bout of rain.

So I decided to rip out the remaining plants and harvest the patch already while the soil is still dry. Even so, there were many damaged tubers, several rodent tunnels, and quite a few slugs huddling in groups that I destroyed mercilessly.

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Again, each of these crates contains 4 kg of tubers, except the middle one in the lower row, which contains 3,5 kg of the tiniest ones. The sack on the left weighs approximately 5 kg and contains 100 pieces of seed potatoes for next year. Not depicted is a bucket with circa 7 kg of heavily damaged potatoes that will need to be sorted and processed quickly.

Even though I put aside seeding potatoes, I am not so enthused about this variety as I am about Bellarosa:

1. The overall result of 43,5 kg from 5 kg of seed is slightly better than Bellarosa, especially considering that they were partially destroyed by mice in the spring. This variety sprouted later and had a slightly longer growing season.
2. There was no blight, and the pest damage was slightly more than with Bellarosa. This was somewhat offset (the overall number of damaged tubers is about the same) by my not damaging as many tubers with the rake, but the waste from that bucket will be substantial.
3. The size of the tubers is more spread out than with Bellarosa. I got one 4 kg crate with just 12 tubers, which is impressive. But overall, the tubers do seem smaller on average – 12 kg of big, 16 kg of small, and 3,5 kg of tiny tubers fit for storage.
4. The plants did survive the heatwaves well, but…
5. … as the title implies, the tubers seem to be much more scabby/warty than Bellarosa. So despite the name, they did not cope with the heat quite as well. This is mainly a cosmetic issue, but it slightly increases the waste from peeling.

So still not impressed, but content with how this turned out. We shall now test which meals these are suitable for and whether they can be dehydrated.