Tag: tepary beans

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Recent food and beverage

Some tepary beans mixed in those refried beans! The hot sauce is Chimayó pepper mostly. 01/25/2024.
Homemade pasta with homemade pesto. 01/24/2024.
I finally roasted the yaupon holly leaves instead of just having it dehydrated. It’s actually a nice tea now! I did 300 F for somewhere over 1.5 hrs on a cookie sheet. 01/22/2024.
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12/21/2023 preparing for solstice rain

The rain barrel on its now bare stand, with the tepary bean vine pile, a glass Pyrex bowl of tepary bean pods, and a rolling stool on the driveway in front of it, on a cloudy day.
We have been slowly harvesting all the tepary beans dry off the vine. The vines made this rain barrel hard to use in summer, so we’ll stick to no vines on it next year. I moved some strawberries to under the rain barrel where I can let it drip on them in summer.
I’m holding a dormant ampelopsis plant. Its root has two side branches and the main root branch is torn.
I’ve had my eye on an Ampelosis near the woodpile all summer. It’s finally dormant but it turned out to be mostly under the edge of the patio. We shall see if it lives.
I point at four clumps of a divided sedge at the base of the red oak, among many fallen leaves.
A native sedge in the backyard sprouts up between the pavers periodically, so I’m slowly moving (and dividing them) out of the path. I like to move plants in the winter right before rains so I don’t have to water them.
I’m holding a dried mystery grass by the tops. One seedhead is visible.
Top of grass
I’m holding a dormant grass by the base, so you can see the roots are relatively short in the damp earth.
Roots
Four grasses, I think all one species, came up between the concrete blocks and the path, not on the other side of the blocks where I wanted native grasses. I don’t recognize this one but I assume I put it there and it washed down. I moved all four back into the prairie area. The soil is still nice and soft after last week’s inch of rain.

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05/27/2023 backyard before and after

All the pulled invasive dayflowers and bermudagrass was piling up on the path by the mini prairie.
Since we had guests coming this evening for an outdoor meal I swept everything and pulled up some of the endless maple seedlings that were sprouting too. This shows off the tepary beans starting to climb the trellis too!
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01/18/2023 refried bean learning times and field violet transplants

It rained 0.31” in Norman in the night on 01/18. The night before I moved a bunch of seedlings of Viola bicolor, the wild annual field violets that volunteer in the yard. I want more of them as ground cover for early spring so I am moving many from existing locations in and near the raised beds. They seem to be doing well! When I’ve transplanted larger plants once they bloom, they don’t do nearly as well.
Paula prepared tepary beans for refrying. The pair of tiny ones at the bottom are wild type teparies.
Paula made a quesadilla with a layer of the refried tepary beans. Her diagnosis was that they worked fine and had a good taste, but that she should have added more lard and onions to make them less dry.
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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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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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06/04/2022 unexpected excitement

Saw a great little jumping spider on the ironweed leaves.
An interesting bee or velvet ant male or something, on white avens leaf. It was one of the nervous kinds who keeps flicking their wings constantly.
The rain of the last few days prompted the Missouri fluttermill primrose to bloom again!
The Chef and I cleared leaves off the patio. In several places they were up against the wood siding which is not great as they are essentially composting. Here Briar holds down a leaf pile for us. We leave the leaves in the rest of the yard as that is best for a healthy woodland environment!
The worst offending area of leaf collection next to the house. This is after I pulled out the bulk of leaves. Our compost pile should be happy now!
An extremely tiny planthopper that the Chef found on the outdoor work bench.
The last round of tepary beans I planted are coming up.
The big thrill of the day… The horse crippler cactus in the rock garden has bloomed!!!! I imagine this means it’s either happy here or thinks it’s about to die. Hopefully the former. Since I just planted it this spring I wasn’t expecting it, and its flower bud was not obvious, or grew in really fast the last few days when I wasn’t looking with the rain.