I’m harvesting a tubful of beans each week, so come out to the Broadway Community Market tomorrow morning to pick up a quart or two. They’re delicious sautéed and mixed with a bit of ginger, soy sauce, and sweet chili sauce or simply steamed with a little butter and salt (make that garlic salt!).

The first few zucchini ripened this week as well, and I pulled up another couple bunches of sweet, crisp carrots. And of course, the Perpetual Spinach chard is still going strong. It’s a great summer green.

While we don’t have any ripe tomatoes yet, the vines are heavy with green fruit that will hopefully start blushing any day now. The okra, too, shows promise, with its creamy white blooms opening up and the first little pod forming. Unfortunately, the cucumbers and peppers got off to a slow start this year, but both are finally starting to bloom.

Everything, of course, depends on me keeping the resident groundhog out. Every time I go out to the garden, it has dug another hole under the fence and nibbled more leaves off the beans and sweet potato vines. But I seem to have foiled it last night, so fingers crossed it doesn’t find another way in.

See you at the market!

We got some much-needed rain last night, and the garden is finally beginning to look like it should in midsummer, though most things are still a week or two behind. In the past week, I’ve spotted the first okra blossom, pepper flowers, and baby Dragon’s Egg cucumbers. The tomatoes, too, are finally setting fruit, revealing that I planted three Amish Paste plants in the bed of slicing tomatoes (always clearly label your seedlings, folks).

As expected, the beans have taken off after that first small harvest last week, and I have a good pile of them for market tomorrow. I’m growing two varieties, both stringless bush beans. Provider is a crisp, flavorful green bean great for steaming, sautéing, freezing, pickling, or eating fresh off the plant. The colorful one is Dragon Tongue, a yellow wax bean with purple streaks, and it can be used in all the same ways as the Provider beans. I think they have even better flavor than most green beans, especially when pickled.

I also harvested the first few carrots today, and I’ll have them at the market tomorrow. The orange variety is called Chantenay, chosen because it grows well even in our Virginia clay. And I seem to have a theme going, because the purple ones are Purple Dragon carrots. Despite their plum-colored skin, they are bright orange inside.

So, tomorrow at my market table you can find beans, carrots, and chard, as well as crocheted and knitted items.

(And since I know you’re wondering, according to the Chinese calendar, 2023 is actually the year of the rabbit, which I believe makes next year the year of the dragon. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of dragon-themed produce then, too!)

See you at the market!

The summer harvest truly begins with the first handful of beans. From there, everything seems to descend into a kind of delightful, abundant chaos: beans, zucchini, tomatoes, okra… I suddenly find myself scrambling to keep up with the harvesting, never mind the weeding, trellising, and watering.

All spring I repeat like a mantra, “Soon, soon, soon.” And then a handful of beans, and a week or two later, everything.

We’re at the handful-of-beans stage this week, so if you want to taste the firstfruits of summer, come early to the market tomorrow! I also still have chard (it’s called perpetual spinach for a reason!) and the last of the kale, most of which is now more holes than leaves thanks to the pretty but destructive harlequin beetles.

I got a lot of questions about the ‘Perpetual Spinach’ chard last week, so I’ll review it again here. This might just be one of my favorite greens. It is chard, but it has a mild flavor and actually tastes more like spinach. For those, like me, who don’t care for chard, this is a great variety. It can be used raw or cooked, just like spinach, and you can chop up the stems to cook with the leaves, just like chard. The “perpetual” in the name comes from the fact that chard grows from spring until first frost, unlike spinach, which bolts as soon as the summer heat creeps in.

What can you use perpetual spinach in? Anything that calls for chard or spinach! I’ve even put it on pimiento cheese sandwiches. (Jillian’s Farmstead Kitchen, also at the market, has some great pimiento cheese and sourdough bread.)

See you at the market!