How To Freeze Your Green Beans

If we’re lucky, many of us end up with tons of green beans. My bush beans are starting to wind up their season and the pole beans are still going fairly strong. For me, it’s time to think about preserving some of the bounty!

Canning can be scary to the uninitiated, but freezing is simple and can be done with a lot of your garden veggies. Beans are the perfect candidate.

Step 1: Cut the ends off.

Step 2: Cut the beans into your favorite size.

Step 3: Blanch them in boiling water for about 3 minutes. (This is a necessary step because it will eliminate the normal aging enzymes etc. in the beans.)

Step 4: Cool them quickly in water and ice.

Step 5: Dry them off.

Step 6: Into a freezer bag. Freeze.

They will keep longer in a deep freeze, but 8 or 9 months in a normal freezer will work too. They don’t go bad, they just might not taste as good after longer. When you are ready to cook them, just do what you normally would with frozen beans – microwave for a minute or two or boil or steam or whatever…

Filed under: beans , how to freeze green beans, pictures of freezing green beans, preserving green beans

Purple Pole Beans

Rough garden day. Returned from vacation to lots of blight, lots of collapsed tomatoes, lots of mole tunnels leading right into my potatoes, lots of new bugs.

More on the blight later.

But as I was hitting peak discouragement, I noticed these beautiful beans. Picked them. We ate them with dinner. More beans. Good for the gardening spirit.

Filed under: beans , pole beans

Beans beans, the beautiful fruit!

Purple Trionfo

Part of the reason to plant pole beans (aside from their long-term, prolific yields!) is how stinkin’ pretty they are.

Pole beans usually lag bush beans by a 1 – 3 weeks for production. My bush beans have been giving for about 2 weeks now and the pole beans are showing signs of serious life.

Flowers. Pretty pinky, purply ones.

Pretty soon the whole teepee will be teeming with them. I’ve got borlotto (cranberry), kentucky wonder, and purple trionfo. The vines are hearty, adventurous (tentacling around random garden stakes, bush beans, the cat.. whatever they can latch onto) and really, really pretty.

Filed under: beans, vegetable garden , pole bean flowers, pole beans, pole vs. bush beans