legumes Archives : Cast Iron Forest to Skillet

2023-01-212023-01-21

01/21/2023 refried cowpeas

Paula has been experimenting with what beans can be refried using the Rancho Gordo refried bean recipe. The refried cowpeas were great! These were the Corrientes cowpeas from last summer. Tacos had ground venison for the meat; the non-tomato veggies were mostly from the farmshare.

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01/02/2023 Oklahoma selected tepary beans

I have decided to mix our tepary beans next year to cross pollinate and see what does best here with our spring rainy season. This photo shows the general mix with three randomly selected handfuls (the three pictures below). The remaining beans will be eaten! I started with 1:1:1:2:3 mix of blue-speckled, yellow, San Ignacio, Pinacate, and black tepary beans in 2022, planted in same-variety blocks along the south trellis, plus a very small amount of the surviving wild type tepary beans (planted Aaap, Santa Catalina, Sycamore Canyon, and Kitt Peak varieties intermixed so whatever survived best from those) from nativeseeds.org). For 2023 and later (ie this upcoming season), we will plant these together and see what happens.

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11/24/2022 plenty of thanks

We thought it was supposed to rain today, so yesterday we picked up all the tomato cages and put all the vegetable debris in the city compost pile. (I don’t know that ours gets hot enough to kill any diseases.). We piled the dead marigolds on the bed where we’ll put peppers next year. We put some sugar pea seeds there to see if the debris will shelter them. We took the plastic off the greens so they could get rain. We put cilantro seeds everywhere and carrot seeds among the greens.

For Thanksgiving, Paula started our Corrientes cowpeas soaking.

The Turkey is from Paula’s aunt and uncle in Texas where they raise some. All the veggies in the beans are from the farm share except garden poblanos. Wes used some store apples and store ham as flavors. But otherwise the veggies are all our garden or the farm share!

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10/11/2022 and other recent foods

Tonight contains garden onions.

The Brussels sprouts in the left side are topped with sweet Corbaci peppers from the garden.

Paula made a bean and potato chunky soup. The giant beans are Royal Corona beans, a type of runner bean, which came in our first Bean Club shipment.

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10/03/2022 Bean Club dinner and other excitement

My colleague gave me these delicious tiny tomatoes from her sister’s garden east of here. She said it’s a hybrid between tommy toe and another variety and has bred true for two ish years! I’m saving some!

A yellow iris by the rock garden.

Polenta with cranberry beans from Bean Club and fancy sausage from California. Salad includes farm share peppers and the main mean also included summer squash from the farm share.

A cooked cranberry bean. They were very creamy in texture!

The cranberry bean broth was very savory. The Chef laughed at us taking a picture.

Here’s some of the remaining cranberry beans. They have a tan base but occasionally the red speckles and stripes turn the bean almost completely red!

You can see they are nice chunky big beans. Larger than the average pinto.

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9/29/2022 farm share and Bean Club dinner

Jalapeño poppers with farm share peppers, grilled cheese sandwiches with farm share tomatoes, and farm share purple hulled pinkeye cowpeas, French green lentils from Bean Club, and summer squash from the farm share. Thank you Paula!

09/24/2022 seedlings and fall flowers

Wild tepary bean has a flower!

Mystery seedling. I put a lot out here of many species so it gets to be a surprise unless someone recognizes it.

I suspect this is an Illinois bundleflower as I distributed a lot of them.

The big leafy seedling looks neat and is accompanied by a spotted euphorbia and maybe a blurry lyre leaf sage?

An almost metallic little moth on the goldenrod from Abby (probably S. canadensis). Mom saw a similar one recently at home on frostweed.

Possibly a Ceratina bee on the mistflowers.

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09/09/2022 two leaf senna

The two leaf senna is getting more and more flowers every day! It has at least 2-3 green seed pods. The second plant hasn’t got any flower buds, but has some new pairs of leaves.

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09/04/2022 seeds!!!

The two leaf senna had at least two seed pods! The second plant doesn’t have any buds but is growing new leaves.

This sprouted after another surprise rain this morning and I don’t know what it is.

Cowpen daisies I bought are sprouting!

The scurf pea (Psoralea/Pediomelium latestipulata) from Mom has its first adult leaf!

Little seedlings sprouting. Could be what I planted (Scarlet globemallow), could be volunteers.

More cowpen daisies in a pot where I put them and some Rosa sp from Mom from Fannin Co TX.

Tiny seedlings in the soil from Jeanne that contains the annual Sedum nutallii!

Little seedlings sprouting. Again, could be what I planted, could be volunteers. This hope is Verbena halei.

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08/24/2022 giant squash time and other things

I thought I saw something in a firewood piece.

It was a mason wasp!

The Chef made a delicious dinner. BLT with farm share tomatoes and Paula’s sourdough bread. The okra and peppers side was breaded and pan fried, with both farm share and garden okra, topped with cholula hot sauce.

These corrientes cowpea leaves seemed maybe diseased because they were covered in light yellow speckles, so I removed them.

Some sort of fungus maybe on the basil? It is the round dark spot I’m pointing to with my snippers. I have been removing them. If anyone knows otherwise, I’d let a leaf miner live.

Trimmed all the basil this evening for the Chef to do a pesto batch.

This corrientes cowpea stem is flat like a ribbon.

Side view of flat stem of cowpea. A mystery.

Last but definitely not least, the giant green-striped cushaw squash.

I’m not sure if Briar was concerned or unimpressed.

We got out the bathroom scale for this magnificent beast. The squash weighed 14.5 lbs. Last year’s big squash was barely 7 lbs.