Shelling dried green beans

Over a month ago, right before our first hard frost of the fall, we pulled all of the bean plants from the garden, and hung them up on the clotheslines on the sunporch to finish drying. The majority of the plants were our dry beans, both dragon tongue and kenearly yellow eye. But some of the plants were green bean plants with mature-looking green beans on them. We dried them to save the beans for planting next year.

The dry beans I dealt with pretty quickly, as the clotheslines full of drying bean plants were seriously impairing our view of the fields from the living room. As far as the dry beans go, the kenearly yellow eye were very easy to shell, and most had actually fully dried outside on the plant before our first frost, so I prefer growing them, but they didn't have anywhere near the yield as the dragon tongue. However the dragon tongue were such a pain to dry and harvest, as they not only molded on the sunporch but got covered in spider mites & their webbing, that I think I might be looking for a shorter season dry bean to add to the kenearly yellow eye next summer.

The green bean plants were a little out of the way where they were hung, and there weren't as many of them, so they've been ignored for the most part, although my husband has mentioned dealing with them himself a couple times, if I didn't hurry up and clean them up. Of course, him 'dealing' with them would be just tossing them out to the chickens, beans and all, so I have been assuring him I would be dealing with them 'soon'.

Well this weekend 'soon' came, and Little M and I pulled the very dry beans off the plants, and then shelled them. There were 2 different types of beans that we grew this past summer - blue lake bush and kentucky wonder bush. The blue lake bush seems to have done better, but it was hard to tell this year as the plants were in mixed rows due to poor germination. I'll plant both again this coming summer and try to keep track of which does better here.

Snowfall!

We've gotten our first snowfall that makes it feel like winter is here to stay, and so I finally feel like I have something to blog about! I love waking up to the house looking so bright and white from all the snow outside the windows covering all the trees and grasses. With the woodstove burning bright and the only other light coming in from the windows, the house just feels like it's already christmas, even though there aren't any decorations up yet at all :)

The world feels still and calm and pure. I don't know if I could live in a place that never got snow. Even the amount we get here in a normal winter isn't quite enough for me. I just love snow and all that winter means!

Well hello there!

When I wrote my last post (ahem) 2 weeks ago or thereabouts, and included 'slowing down for winter' in the title, I really didn't anticipate slowing down quite this much on the blogging front... But, life happens, and here it is 2 weeks later! Nothing really to report on the home front, it's been cold, and wet, and wet, and cold. And we haven't really been doing all that much at all!

Luckily the forecast is finally looking a bit more promising on the white stuff front, and hopefully soon we will be sitting cozy under our winter blanket of snow. This in between time is hard for me, all the outside chores that could be done now but could wait until spring, the damp cold, the dreary days. Snow makes everything just so much cheerier in my books.

In the meantime, I'll try and get in as many hours of work as I can manage (the office has really gotten slow in the past month, I've been lucky to get 3 billable hours a day lately, which hurts the budget (aka mortgage payoff) just a wee bit). We've been managing to stay pretty much on top of the housework, Little M and I, although the length of the house is spread with the lego's, toys, and blankets that almost 3 year old productivity entails!

Well, that's likely it for updates, hopefully it won't be quite so long until my next post here, and even more hopefully the next one will include glorious snow pictures! (we'll see - fingers crossed!)