A quick glance at the tomato patch across the road would make you think that I ought to be over there picking tomatoes, but I am disgusted with them. All summer long, I have thrown away far more tomatoes than I've kept, either because the sun had baked them hard or because blight had made black lesions on them. When I was over there Saturday, looking for some ripe ones to take to my mother's birthday lunch, I could barely find a dozen tomatoes that were decent for slicing. We've had a good bit of rain lately, which has caused most of the ripe tomatoes to swell and burst like water balloons. Turtles and birds have been feasting on the rest.
The butterbeans and green beans are coming in. We've picked butterbeans twice now, but they've needed it more frequently than I've gotten around to it. Many of the beans have dried on the vines. Last weekend, having grown fed up with my tardiness in picking the speckled butterbeans, Pop-Pop pulled up about 1/3 of the plants, tossed them onto a wagon, and towed the wagon underneath a shade tree to pick beans the easy way.
I learned some things (the hard way) about running beans this year. (1) Do not plant three rows of running beans next to one another unless you want to end up with one giant, knotted row of butter-green-butter beans. (2) Running butterbeans are heavy; use sturdy a sturdy staking system unless you want the stakes to topple like dominoes as the beans mature. (3) In the event the first two suggestions go unheeded, get somebody else to do the picking. ;)
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