There is a point every summer when three things in our garden seem to take over our life- green beans, zucchini, and cucumbers. This year was no exception. In fact, this year Jeff planted even more of each of those things than usual and we had our most abundant garden of all time. We had an every other day harvest schedule, though sometimes daily harvests were required. Harvesting, and then processing each harvest could take hours.

Though it seemed we had more food than we could ever eat, we ate loads of fresh vegetables every day, shared some vegetables with friends, and then fermented, dried, and froze the rest for the winter. It’s now November, and at the beginning of this month I was marveling at the fact that we were eating the very last zucchini, cucumbers, and beans coming in from the garden. We were grateful for such a long harvest season.

Every fall I like to share some of our favorite varieties with you from that year’s garden season, in case you are interested. I wrote about our most productive bean trellis in this post, and our favorite pole bean variety. I also wanted to share a bean we grew for the first time- Dragon Tongue Bush Beans. Usually we prefer growing pole beans because we get so much more food for the space, and only grow bush beans here and there where we have gaps in the garden, but the Dragon Tongue Beans were so prolific that they changed my opinion about bush beans. They were also really beautiful, as you can see in the third and fourth pictures above. They are included in next year’s garden plans.

We also loved the same cucumber varieties we grew in last year’s garden, Marketmore and Double Yield, which I wrote about in the post. We grew Boston Pickling cucumbers this year and they were a good overall cucumber to add to the mix. We grew Monika cucumbers for the first time and they were not our favorite variety, but they don’t need pollination to set fruit so we might consider growing those in the greenhouse in the future. As for zucchini, my favorite again was the Emerald Delight variety. We also like Black Beauty. (Both mentioned in last year’s post.)

It felt like our meals included green beans for so long we hardly knew what to do without them when they stopped rolling in from the garden. We’ve already been eating the ones we froze. We’re also really appreciating the pickles we fermented throughout the summer, one of our very favorite things. I’m still sorting summer pictures as I get the chance, and I’m looking forward to sharing more things from the garden with you.