These are October Beans. As you can imagine, they won’t be ready until even late October, perhaps November. My old neighbor to the hermitage will enjoy seeing that these finally took hold and are growing well. You can’t get them anywhere except from someone who has kept some of the beans from the previous years. Not all of them will take hold. But you only need, say, five to make a nice soup, so big are they.
July 1 was the Feast of the Precious Blood of Jesus, and July is the month of the Precious Blood. October Bean flowers are quite appropriate for Flowers for the Immaculate Conception to honor the Precious Blood, don’t you think? They remind me of what happens with the Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land.
Our Lady knows something about those drops of the Precious Blood:
These October Beans are catching on now, though they had a very rough start with white mold, etc. They are already putting out blossoms. Uh-oh. There must be something about October Bean blossoms that attract murderous wars of the creatures pictured below (an older picture from near the hermitage of yore) …
As the vines grow up high and wide, hopefully, there will be perhaps a hundred some blossoms (with future beans), and that will attract Humming Birds. I’ve never seen more frightening “dog-fights” than Humming Bird dog-fights over October Bean blossoms, and my dad was a highly decorated USMC fighter-attack Corsair Squadron Commander.
Yikes!
Just some entertainment supplied by Immaculate Mary’s Divine Son, Jesus, for her.
What? You think Jesus’ good mom wouldn’t appreciate her Son’s good creation?
Even when it was just little, I couldn’t bring myself to rip up this weird grass, because, well, it just didn’t look like grass, and, what if something really cool? So I let it grow. It still looks like weird grass. It’s now pretty tall, measuring a good couple of feet. A neighbor said, “Hey, that looks like garlic!” I have no idea, but I would like this. In future years, this would mean that the “driveway garden” would be overwhelmed by garlic. I love garlic. We’ll see. I don’t see any spears coming off, no strange seed tops, not yet, anyway. The neighbors have a patch of garlic. Somehow some bulbs must have gotten into their miniature therapy horse poop hill in their back yard. They let me take wheelbarrows of that for my gardening ventures. But, we’ll see. Maybe it’s just grass. But maybe not. Be open to volunteers. It may be just what you want.
Meanwhile, “Brake-Man” below is has his usual complement of flora that has been there for years. He’ll soon disappear, turning into a mountain of green.
The lettuce in the seed boxes on the front steps is struggling, as everything is all dug up pretty continuously by squirrels looking for black walnuts that they buried last year. But maybe some will survive. I should get smart and cover over the tops with a dome of chicken wire that I can sneak a hand under for weeding but which will outsmart a squirrel.
The rose bush – very old now – hasn’t yet put any buds out, but they will soon appear. These will be Flowers for the Immaculate Conception.
The tomatoes are starting to produce:
I planted the tomatoes too early, and some were killed off by the hard frost and the bucket I had over them to protect them, or so I thought. I moved what I thought were dead plants to an unused part of the asparagus patch, hoping beyond hope that they just might come back. I am amazed. They all lived. There are actually five strugglers in this picture below, all relocated way to close to each other, but we’ll see what happens. I was really careless and rough with them when moving them. I guess they thought it was just fine, as they get more sun next to the asparagus patch. This will be an experiment about planting them way too close to each other. I’ll have to get better at weeding, I know.
I am tempted to use insecticide and fungicide this year…. Any advice on that for the tomatoes, and for the spaghetti squarrrsh if they grow? I don’t think anything else will need such things.
The asparagus doesn’t care about any insects or fungus. They just grow like crazy. It’s the moles and voles that can be a problem. Any advice about those critters?
Is this a weed or a volunteer carrot?
Meanwhile… OCTOBER BEANS! These almost died bringing them home. They got white mold on most of the leaves and were totally wilted. I ripped off all the infected leaves and got them good soil and plenty of water. They look much better now. I hope these aren’t poison ivy!
I hope these produce some beans that I can plant next year, and maybe even enough for some soup. You only need six or half dozen for a great soup dish, so big are they. Maybe I’ll have enough to give some to my gardening neighbors. It’s always, always good to pass around the blessings.
The spaghetti squarrrsh from last year are only now on the menu. They have kept very, very well. The seeds are being planted round about. We’ll see what happens to them. I’m experimenting with preparation. Instead of heating up the house with a super-hot stove for 40 minutes, a half or quarter is popped into the microwave for five minutes. I found them to come out al dente, and not all watery and steamy and hard to deal with, with a much better texture with all the flavor. Butter and salt is what I like. Delicious. No squash this year. Enough of that! It’ll all be spaghetti squash.
Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about getting chickens…
MEANWHILE: In another garden, the Lord’s vineyard, there will be total mayhem at the church tonight for the vigil Mass in Spanish. I told everyone to take pictures as it will be obvious to the diocese that we need a bigger church. But, this will be a bit of an exception because of people coming from far and wide. We have four baptisms, eleven confirmations, and four first Holy Communions. Of course, there will also be Confessions before. Hopefully no Last Rites needed! We love the sacraments in this parish, in this garden of souls. :-)
Sixty years old. My first time gardening. Mistakes are bound to be made:
Never having planted squarrrsh, I didn’t know how expansive they are, how much they hog the sun, putting up an impenetrable canopy. Pretty much all my cucumbers have bitten the dust, planted too near the squarrrsh. Cucumbers can climb. They don’t mind being in seed-boxes. So, they’ll get the seed boxes next year.
The squarrrsh are doing… um… waaay tooo well. Unlike the cucumbers, they don’t need to be near a fence. And now I know they do NOT do well as they could if they were NOT to be in seed boxes. The branches break off at the edge of the seed boxes, exposing the wide-open tunnels of the inner branches to all sorts of critters. So, next year, no seed boxes for squarrrsh.
The tomatoes are doing well. There is still one without one tomato. Others have half a dozen already on the way, some tiny, some tennis ball sized. The tomato cages I put over the just planted plants were put down… um…. upside down! What do I know?! Obviously nothing. Such beginner mistakes. But barring plagues and moulds and rust and such, it looks like I’ll be getting at least some tomatoes. There are, among my 14 plants, some just a few feet high, some over five feet, now some 55, make that 60 tomatoes. But my neighbors laugh at my upside down cages. :-)
I planted a squarrrsh plant right in the midst of the asparagus forest, making it about impossible to see the new asparagus. But that will be corrected next year. The cucumbers will go with the asparagus. It’s a space thing.
The October Beans never appeared at all. The seeds either didn’t germinate because I planted them way too deep, or rotted for the same reason, or were eaten by critters for the same reason. There’s a reader of the blog who asked for such seeds years ago… if he hasn’t planted them — Hey! — send them back! I’m gonna try to grow these again next spring, which isn’t that far away. 82 Third Street; Andrews, NC, 28901, USA!
The biggest mistake was experimenting with spaghetti squarrrsh seeds. I dumped the seeds in the ground with no fertilizer, no extra care, no special soil. Nothing. They exploded are now huge, taking over the house. As you can see from the picture above, I’m guiding them along the top of a two-foot high wire fence. Just in that picture you can already count three spaghetti squarrrshes. They get huge, like a small watermelon, weighing in at four to eight pounds each. Yikes! My question: should I rip these vines off the top of the fence and place them on the ground? And actually, it’s already too late, as some lengths of the vine itself is woven into the fence and can’t possibly be removed. A huge mistake? or is this still alright?
These are the flowers of October beans. They stay around for quite a while, providing bees (who get annoyed with humming birds) and fighter-attack humming birds (who instantaneously go into all out war mode upon seeing bees) with that over which they enjoy a good battle.
The beans are enormous, their existence pretty much denied by everyone. I had pictures of them up on a previous blog published from the hermitage, and a reader denied the possibility asking that I send a few exemplars his way. I did. He wrote back a very apologetic letter saying he shouldn’t have doubted that the Lord could create such beauties. Just a handful will make a great soup for the day.
I imagine the Immaculate Conception would have made some really good soups of all kinds for Jesus and any and all orphan kids in the town. You can also extend soup for another mouth to feed. October beans, being so big, would be just the thing.
Of course, these beans wont be ready until – you guessed it – October. But they can be saved all year. Let me see, what’s that feast in October dedicated to something to do with our Lady? That feast day also has something to do with a certain kind of flowers and… and… with a famously epic battle that changed the entire course of history. Such violence! Our Lady knows all about it. October beans flowers are most appropriate for her. I’m sure you guessed what that feast day is by now and how that feast day came about… Time for fill-in-the-blank fun:
What was the most useful weapon of war in that battle called? ____________
ARISE! LET US BE GOING! 