Fast forward again: Holy shit, beans!

Weeding and watering and basic care of the little baby plants continued, and many of them got pretty big. I learned the hard way that you do indeed need to thin carrots and beets, as directed, or they remain tiny and carrots will wrap their roots (their carrots, if you will) around each other and get all curly and tangled. It's alarming.

With the notable exception of the mystery row, which is growing almost exclusively weeds, the plants all grew quite well. Little tiny pale green tomatoes, hard as rocks, appeared on the tomato plants which we transplanted, so they had a little head start.

Of the seed-started plants, though, the bush beans were the early performers. They were fast growing and leafy and made tiny little flowers that attracted a fair number of bees. They were only about a foot and a half high, so i wasn't expecting much in the way of beans from them, so I was surprised when one day I was weeding around their bases and saw a three inch long bean pod. Somehow the natal stages of this pod had escaped my notice and here it was, fully formed. Upon closer inspection there were a couple dozen large pods and many smaller ones scattered between the ten or so bean bushes crowded into their little row. I went and did a quick google search to figure out how to tell when beans are ready and how to pick them. A couple of generations ago this information would be as basic as tying your shoes.

So apparently all bean varieties have an immature but edible phase before the beans within the pod fully differentiate, and this is what string beans are. While I left many of the pods to fully mature, I picked some of the others, and we ate these early string beans with dinner.

Kick ass. My first legitimate vegetable yield.