The Multi-Vitamin Garden

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Dried Beans

Stamp collecting is fun, but bean collecting is fun, tasty and nutritious. I'll admit I've been bitten by the bean-collecting bug. How can anyone ignore a crop that's easy to grow, harvest and store, fun to thresh, a nitrogen-fixer and a great source of low-fat protein? Snap and shell beans will dry if you let them, but there are dozens of specific dried bean cultivars. Colors and patterns abound. Names, too: Although most everyone knows about navy, pinto, black, kidney and Great Northern beans, how many people have heard of Lazy Wife, Gramma Walters, Montezuma Red and Mortgage Lifter? You can grow bush or pole varieties of many dried beans. The bush kind take less work, but some folks swear the poles have more flavor. Except for favas, all beans love warm weather. You can also inoculate the seeds with rhizobium bacteria to help the root nodules fix nitrogen in your soil. Pre-soaking the seeds will sometimes cause them to split, so I give them a head start by rolling them up in damp cloths or paper towels that are then stored in plastic bags. When the root tip (or radical) starts to protrude, plant them tip down one to two inches under the soil, depending on the va riety's seed size. Keep an eye out for Mexican bean beetles - you can squash or handpick the bugs, eggs and larvae. Better yet, interplant the beans with pota toes; the two companions tend to repel each other's pests. For best results, the plants should be kept generally free from weeds and well-watered. Still, we've suc cessfully grown several kinds of dried beans in a field that received no irriga tion and little cultivation. Their hardiness is impressive. As fall wears on, your beans will dry as they stand - branch, leaf and pod. When your other harvest chores slow a bit, pull the bean plants up and hang them to dry further. There are various home-scale methods of threshing them (separating the beans from their pods); we've put them in a sack and shuffled and clogged all over them! You can freeze the beans for a few days to kill weevils and their eggs. Then dry them some more until you can't dent them with your teeth. That's it. Store them in a lidded glass jar and the colorful seeds will add to your kitchen as well as to your diet.

The Sunflower Wall

Sunflowers have uses other than nutritional. A more beautiful windbreak couldn't be built. Planted thickly, sunflowers can provide a wind-pollination barricade between crops. The leaves can be used as cattle feed and the dried stems as cord fiber, kindling, or support poles for next year's peas. The heads make lovely table centerpieces and good squirrel feeders, and - of course - serve as a very effective way to lure birds to the garden.

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