Did you know you can grow a second harvest of many vegetables? I just learned about this and am excited to plant beans again and make use of the now-empty garden space where the potatoes, lettuce, and beets used to be.

Planting a Second Harvest

After dinner tonight, I plan to head out into the vegetable garden and dig through the remaining dirt in the potato beds to find any remaining Yukon golds. They are so delicious and tender that we have been enjoying the fingerling potatoes for many meals.

I’m not a fan of eating potato skins, but when they’re grown 100% organic and I know exactly what is in the soil, I even ate the skins and boy were they good. I plan to plant more Dutch brown and Jacob’s Cattle heirloom beans. I’ve been collecting the seeds, but the yield is disappointing. I was too tentative in my planting this spring.

After planting way too many green beans in 2009, I was hesitant to plant more than half a bed of each, but honestly when you’re growing heirloom beans to dry and use the seeds, it’s a different thing altogether. Green beans have to blanched, frozen and/or canned (if I had a pressure canner, which I don’t); heirloom beans are solar dried and shelled, and that’s it.

Now according to the Cooperative Extension sheet I printed out last night, my fall veggie should go in around August 20th.  I’ll probably push that planting off a few more days, but I’ve already got turnip, Brussels sprouts and broccoli seeds waiting.  Maybe I will have better luck this year and not have to fight the worms and moths for them – wouldn’t it be nice to have that last harvest, crisped by the frost, just in time for Thanksgiving?