Green Bean Emergency

I had a phone call from a friend, she asked what I was up to. The answer was that I am in the middle of a green bean emergency. It seems to happen this time of year, when all of a sudden and without a lot of warning, the row in the garden explodes with beans and I can’t keep up.  I always thought it was because I planted too many in the spring, but this year I only bought one packet and still I am nearly drowning in beans.

Between picking and hauling bowls full of beans to the house, I have sent text messages out to the neighbors reporting the green bean emergency, but it is summer time and many are out of town or busy with their own gardens (I suspect the same emergency is affecting them as well). While complaining about my emergency, I was asked over to another friends house to pick figs for they are ready and about to fall off the tree or just rot right there on the branches. Well that’s just dandy, another emergency. I will have to fit picking the fruit into my schedule somewhere because I believe it is a sin to let good figs go bad.

I love the taste of home canned green beans but I do not have the time to spend with the pressure cooker as well as the fortitude to work for hours and hours to have enough beans ready for the canning process. Instead of canning, I have been snapping and processing them to be frozen as fast as I can before my hands fall asleep from overwork. Today I was able to put in two very full gallon bags of beans in the freezer. I am close to getting half of the row picked. Maybe I need to extend my text alerts farther afield to get some green bean takers. I wonder if Idaho needs any beans, but I can’t worry about that now, so back to the story.

While I have been busy with the beans, I looked over to the next row and saw that the summer squash is nearing the same dire over-bounty issue. I love to bake zucchini bread with the squash that is not being prepared for a meal or sliced into salads. Twenty loaves at a time is what works best, I like to fill the oven. I quadruple the batch  a mix them up in a restaurant sized metal bowl.  Once they are baked, I wrap the loaves individually and seal them into plastic bags to be frozen. The loaves freeze well and will stay delicious well into the spring. The loaves make great last-minute additions to impromptu meals, pot lucks and hostess gifts. But I will not be able to do baking while the green bean emergency is in full swing so that task will be put off for a few days.

The biggest squashes , the ones that cannot wait for a couple of days, will be picked and grated. The grated squash will be spread out onto trays and put into the dehydrator for about 14 hours. The dried squash gets sealed into bags and will be used in the winter time for soups, stews and casseroles. But in the meantime, the green bean emergency continues on…