I walked by the garden the other day and I noticed a few nibbled off branches on one of my tomato plants. My first thought was…the deer have been in here and snacking on my garden! At the same time, a distant memory swam around right under the surface and I knew there was something familiar about this particular scenario. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
As you’ve seen in my posts of the the last few weeks, things have really been busy here on the Ponderosa. Between mowing, gardening, harvesting, canning, and baking bread, I’ve had little time to spend perusing the plants in our little tomato patch. As I pulled the wagon full of produce and groceries from the truck to the house yesterday, I looked over and now my tallest tomato plant was noting but sticks at the top. Now, I know deer can stand up on their hind legs to reach fruit in trees, but I couldn’t see that happening in the middle of a tomato patch without other plants being damaged. That’s when it hit me….that memory of a scourge in a garden decades ago in Colorado.
The tomato hornworm!
As soon as I emptied the wagon, I went out the the garden to look for the nasty beasts! And…there they were. Now, here is where it would have behooved me to do a Google search and learn something about this infestation before I made an unfortunate mistake. When I saw the worms with the white egg like sacs on their backs, I assumed they were eggs. I immediately plucked the stem with the offending monster and mashed it…”eggs” and all.
Enter YouTube. Come to find out, that was what is called a parasitized tomato hornworm. There is a small wasp that lays it’s eggs on the caterpillar. They hatch and become larvae and burrow down into the hornworm…killing it. The trick is to find the hornworms, cut them in half with an old pair of scissors, and be done with them. Then, when you find one with the wasp eggs on it, you carefully snip off the leaf it is currently chowing down on and transfer it to a “sacrificial tomato plant”…one that maybe isn’t growing so well or producing very much. Essentially just giving it something else to eat till the wasp eggs hatch and the larvae kill it naturally. You actually want more of those wasps in nature. Unfortunately…I learned this too late for two hornworms, but now I know better.
I told you yesterday I was going on the prowl for half runner beans and I found them. They are more expensive than stringless green beans because they are labor intensive to produce. The plants are a cross between a bush and a pole variety so they do grow vines. You have to put up stakes down the rows, then two or three times during the growing season, you string twine across from stake to stake and give the vines something to grow on. Half runners produce longer than bush beans and, according to my grandma, they make the best eating beans.
We here in West Virginia cook our green beans to death. A country cook would think you were absolutely crazy to serve a green bean “al dente”. No, you clean your beans, remove the strings, snap them in two to three pieces into a good sized pot, add water and a little bacon or salt pork, some cut up onion, a little salt and black pepper and set it on the back burner to simmer on very low heat all afternoon. You have to watch and add water when necessary because there is no saving a pot of scorched green beans.
After I had the dehydrator loaded with more sliced mushrooms, I gathered my tools and sat down in my recliner to string beans and watch old Frazier reruns with Mr. FixIt. It took me about three to four hours to do the first half of the bushel. I put the cleaned ones, and the remaining beans in the garage fridge to sit overnight and will get back to them today. I place wet hand towels over top of the bean to keep them fresh and moist. Once I finish, I can pack my jars, load my canner, and process them.
My canner holds seven quarts which takes about 14 pounds of beans. So, fourteen quarts will take about twenty-eight pounds and take two rounds with the canner. A bushel weighs about thirty pounds, so I will get fourteen quarts plus enough to cook for supper this evening. Each canner load only processes twenty-five minutes in the pressure canner at our altitude here on the Ponderosa…650 feet elevation, however adding the ten minute boil out time to time building up and reducing pressure naturally…you have at least an hour and a half or two hours per load.
This may seem like an awful lot of work when you can buy a can of green beans for less than a dollar. I can guarantee you, if you haven’t eaten home canned green beans, you don’t know what you’re missing. Sure, home canning is work…sometimes long, hard, hot work. However, inside each sparkling jar of lovingly prepared food is a little slice of summer. It’s not just the food in the jar…it’s what’s NOT in the jar. No preservatives or chemicals….just love and memories and sunshine.
❤️
“Don’t let anyone tell you what you must eat or drink. Don’t let them say you must celebrate the New Moon festival, the Sabbath, or any other festival.”
Colossians 2:16 CEV