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On the topic of beans and essential amino acids.

For a good part of this spring and now on into summer, I have been taking a hard look at beans. Not so much because I like them (I do), but more due to the fact that they are considered nearly a complete food and a good substitute for eating meat. By saying complete food, I mean that beans have most all of what are known as ‘essential amino acids’. These are the protein building units (there are twenty in all) that we all need to be healthy and strong. Given food, our bodies can synthesize twelve of the twenty with the last eight needing to be obtained from some outside source. These sources are most readily found in meat, fish, poultry, milk, cheese, and eggs. The eight amino acids, by the way, are phenylalanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, isoleucine, methionine, leucine, and lysine. Of these three are considered ‘limiting amino acids’ mainly because they hard to find in vegetables. These are methionine, tryptophan and lysine. (Only one legume, Soybean, has all eight essential amino acids). But who wants t eat it J

So, if for whatever reason, you want to abstain from ingesting animal products, you have to look to combinations of veggies that together will provide your body with what it needs. One such combo would be beans and rice! (Beans are only missing tryptophan and or methionine while rice lacks lysine). So, if you had to subsist on just two readily available foods that can be stored for long periods of time, are easy to grow and contribute a lot to your health, then the bean and rice combination is hard to beat. Just a half cup of each will provide about 200 calories, no sodium or cholesterol, plenty of good carbohydrates and loads of dietary fiber to help insure colon health.

Eating Kale for the first time!

For the first time, I have grown a few kale plants to see what they taste like. I found on the internet that kale is not offered very often in markets so many people don’t know how to prepare it. That included me, so I decided to follow what advice I could find and treat it like cabbage. To wit, I trimmed off the stalks and placed a handful of leaves in a steamer for about three minutes.

The kale was then buttered, salted and peppered and eaten. I had to place it into a microwave to finish it off, but will admit that the taste was pretty decent. If you like steamed greens then definitely try this plant.

I won't bother going into the nutritional aspect of this vegetable other than to say it is very healthy. Salute!

Garden Update for June the 22nd

It’s generally right about now, just after the first day of summer that my garden begins to get a little out of control. I have vegetables growing all over the place, in between the ever persistent weeds that always seem to grow faster than anything else. But, this year, I have decided not to get up tight about it and have elected to tolerate a less than perfect garden.

This year I’ve had some successes and some not so great successes to report on. One big plus has been the onion sets I planted in the early spring. They have done marvelous and are near their time of harvest. They are of a white onion variety and I plan to use every bit of them up in salads and on hamburgers as the season progresses.

Another real winner was the romaine lettuce. I’ve been able to harvest some continuously right from the first of the year via the cold frames that were sown with seed the previous fall. Now in the heat of summer, I will be attempting to grow more under a shade cloth. That attempt will be presented in a future video on YouTube.

Now, turning to the not so good. That would be the tomatoes. My eight plants have may one or two little tomatoes on them at this time. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong either. I have some in pots and some in the ground. Perhaps it is the soil or maybe, more likely, the gardener that is at fault. Also, the potatoes were an overall failure due to an ant invasion that basically killed the above ground vegetation. I tore out this area earlier today and was surprised to find eight potatoes that look pretty decent. I’ll report further on these in a later report.

My peppers and crop of dried beans are in the fair to OK range. I have already harvested a few banana type peppers with more on the way. I also have a cucumber vine that, while impressive in size, has not produced a single cucumber. Not sure what’s going on with that guy. That’s the thing about gardening. You never know what kind of year you are going to have. There will be surprises and then some disappointments a long the way. Sort of like life.

Tuna Salad Sandwiches

A very long time ago, I used to come home from work in Chicago and would throw this meal together in just moments. For something so simple, this is a very satisfying sandwich meal. Tuna, is an excellent source of lean protein, vitamins and minerals, and it is a wonderful way to excite the palate while maintaining a balanced diet. However everyone, tuna has more to offer than just great taste and nutrition. Tuna can also help lower blood pressure and cholesterol. Research has shown that omega-3 fatty acids, found in abundance in fatty fish like tuna, can help lower the risk of heart disease, ease the pain of arthritis, reduce asthma complications, and is essential in the growth and development of young children. So, please give this a try.

Ingredients:

2 (6 1/8 oz.) cans Bumblebee white tuna canned in water
1/3 c. Hellmann's mayonnaise
1/4 c. sweet pickle relish
2 tbsp. pickle juice (bread and butter pickles)

Directions:

Thoroughly drain tuna; flake with fork; add mayonnaise and relish; mix well; add pickle juice to moisten; mix well. Chill. Apply between two pieces of bread with a couple of slices of lettuce. Enjoy!

My Great Northern Bean Experiment

Way earlier this season, I think it was sometime around February, I was eating a plate of beans when a thought struck me. I got to wondering about how these beans, which I buy by the bagful at the store, were grown. I wondered if Great Northern Beans were a bush bean or pole bean (for that matter are they a hybrid?). I wondered if I could eat them when the pods were young. Finally, I wondered about how productive such a plant would be. That is to say, how many dried beans could be harvested from an average mature plant and what other factors might inhibit or enhance said production So, that thought turned into an experiment of sorts for me to try this spring and summer.

Along about the middle of April, I planted 25 beans in a small two by two foot area in a raised bed I have out back. I was surprised when after just a few days, most of the beans germinated. In just two short months they went from small to mature and my first two questions were therefore answered. Beans fresh out of the bag do readily germinate and the resulting plant is of the bush variety. By mid June, Each plant was sporting approximately twenty five bean pods with about six little beans in each pod or about 150 dried beans per plant.

I harvested a few of these to cook up in boiling water after first de-stringing them and then cutting them up into small pieces. Once done, I added a little butter and some salt and pepper. They tasted marvelous. So question number three was answered in the affirmative.

Now, I have to wait for the remaining pods to fully mature after which I will carefully harvest the plants to get an idea of the average number of dried bans that can be had per plant. From this data, I can come up with some idea of how many would need to be planted to support a person if that was all they had to eat. I’ll also get an idea of how many new beans a single bean produces. I’ll write about that in a future blog and also plan to have a You Tube Video on this on the Danomanno Channel.

Garden Update for June 12, 2010

Garlic Bulb Transplants

Of the two garlic starts I moved into the raised beds earlier this spring, I went out to find that the tops of one had died. So, I dug it up to see if the single clove had produced new ones. And low and behold, even though they are quite small there three or more cloves! Way cool. I’m going to let this bulb dry a bit before I attempt to separate the cloves. I can tell you this little dude is really potent. After handling the bulb, my hands smell of garlic. The bulb itself weighed in at 13 grams.

Onions Update

The onions that were started as sets continue to bulb up, but not as much as I would like. Right now most of the onions are less than three inches in diameter. I have the plants perhaps too close together and the soil is not of the best quality for this kind of plant. In any case, I will have a good supply to go to should I run out of the store brought.

Potted Kentucky Pole Beans Suffering

The Kentucky pole beans I started in a long tray just have not done very well. I used a potting mix but am beginning to think that since there are no nitrogen fixing bacteria present in this artificial soil that perhaps that is affecting growth. I also noticed that the roots were matted down at the bottom of the tray. So, I went ahead and moved them over to a section of raised bed that was formerly the home of a large overgrown parsley plant. I’ll see how they do in the new home.

Potato Blues

Both my plantings of potatoes have been attacked by ants!. Some of them are even dying at this point and I suspect the ants have decided to set up a colony in both these locations. I tried a soap solution, but that had limited effect. Also, there are Japanese beetles now in increasing numbers. I’ve killed at least twenty in just the past two days.

Dreaded Japanese beetles makes an appearance!

Right on time (it’s June the 8th), the Japanese beetle that plagued some of my vegetables last season are here in southwest Missouri once again. As the name suggests, the Japanese beetle is native to Japan. The insect was first found in the United States in 1916 in a nursery near Riverton, New Jersey. It is thought that beetle larvae entered the United States in a shipment of iris bulbs prior to 1912 when inspections of commodities entering the country began. Since that time they have been spreading relentlessly across the United States.

I noticed them for the first time some years ago, when in the course of just a few days, they decimated my pole bean crops. One day everything was fine and the next there were no leaves left at all! Typically these guys last about a month and then go to wherever they go. But, in the interim, they can really do a number on small garden all across the region.

The last two seasons, I’ve done my best to get my bean plants (which they seem to really love) in early so that I get mature bean pods on the vine before the attacks begin. I’ve been pretty luck this season as the Great Northern beans are all heavily laden with pods. So, for the rest of the month of June, my plan will be to use a spray to kill them as I find them. This may not be the best solution and there are others advertised on the internet. One of the best approaches is to use an application of milky spore disease during its larval stage when it is in the ground. These applications can take up to five years to work so you have to be patient.

In the meantime, Japanese beetles feed on a large range of plants, including leaves of the following common crops; strawberries, beans, tomatoes, peppers, grapes, hops, roses, cherries, plums, pears, peaches, raspberries, blackberries, corn, peas and blueberries.

Tomatoes in bloom….finally!

To hear it told, all my friends who are growing tomatoes this year have large fruit already on the vine! And it’s only the beginning of June! When asked how my plants are doing, I try and mumble my way through the answer. In truth, up until recently, my plants were pretty darn small measuring less than a foot in height. But, over the last couple of weeks they have really begin to take off. All, that is, with the exception of one lone potted plant that has been residing on my balcony. A balcony that faces north, by the way. This little plant is…well… still rather little. So, I’ve moved it to the front of the house which faces south to see if it will catch up.That's it on the left in the picture.

All together, I have a total of seven inderminate (or climbing) plants and eight cherry tomatoes plants growing this year. The seven mid season plants are composed of two Brandywine and four Better Boy varieties. The cherry tomatoes were grown from seed I had and I think are called Sweet 100. These are also pretty small right now but should take off as things warm up.

So, OK, maybe my ‘mater’ will be a little bit long in coming, but I don’t care. Just so long as I actually get to enjoy a few. Deer sighting have been nil so far this season which gives me some hope.

Summer must be here!

I can tell that summer has arrived more by the morning temperature than by the calendar. Anytime it starts to get a little warm and it’s only ten AM, then I begin to take notice. While the official start of summer is a couple of weeks off, the graph at right shows what is pretty much a typical summer temperature regime for southwest Missouri.

What’s this mean for vegetable growers? Well, for one thing, cool weather crops like lettuce will have an increased tendency to bolt. So, if you have a lot growing in your back yard try and get it harvested as soon as possible. Right now I have about twenty heads of romaine lettuce and I’m pretty sure I’ll eat my way through them in the next couple of weeks. Other crops like tomatoes and peppers will begin to really take off as we get into a more tropical climate pattern (hot days and warm nights). I’ve noticed just in the last week or so, a dramatic increase in the size of my potted tomato plants that are on the south facing side of the house.

June is also a good time to make sure you have your beds properly mulched. This will help the soil retain moisture and a cooler temperature even in the blistering heat of mid day. By July, I will even improvise some simple shade covers to help prevent sun scald on the maters. I learned this trick from an old timer who informed me that at one time, southwest Missouri was the tomato growing capitol of the US. Back then, savvy grower would plant their tomatoes under trees to help shade them during the most intense part of the summer. Apparently it worked out pretty well for them.