To make canning fun, you have got to have a well-thought-out plan. Sow bean seed so that all the beans are ripe in the same two weeks, and you'll find canning and freezing the beans a great big chore. Plant the garden so the beans ripen over the eight or twelve weeks of summer, and you'll eat fresh beans as often as you like. And on the days when you don't want to serve beans, you can freeze that day's bean harvest while you cook dinner. It's that simple. If you want to can in 8-quart lots, you don't necessarily have to have 8 quarts of beans ripe at the same time. Each vegetable has a specific processing time. Beans in quart jars are processed in 25 minutes, but so are beets in pint jars. Beets are root crops that can be dug at any point over many weeks, unlike beans, which must be harvested as soon as they are 6 to 8 inches long and still young to get the best flavor and to keep the bushes producing. [You can apply this principle to winter vegetables, too].[This is a copy that I made from a book about 20 years ago, and I do not have the reference--Gard'n Judy].
Do you stagger bean planting? If so, exactly how do you do it?
ReplyDeleteStaggering bean planting is done by planting seeds about every two weeks throughout the summer. That way you don't have a huge crop ready all at once, but a reasonable amount to harvest every few days. The same thing can be done with radishes and greens/lettuces/spinach, etc., those crops that have a shorter growing time. The cole crops, on the other hand, take a long time to be ready to pick, so generally one planting is made.
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